Preliminary Site Reports: 1867-1927

In 1861, the Bourbon territories became part of the Kingdom of Italy. The passage of power was chaotic, and travel to Venosa dwindled out of fear of bandits or brigands who continued to op-pose the Savoy.¹⁴⁸ Venosa, along with Melfi, was a royalist stronghold. When the military occupa-tion of the area was relieved in 1865, more catacomb sightseeing could take place, though long-promised repairs never materialized.¹⁴⁹

In the immediate wake of the brigand suppression, along with other housekeeping activities of the new regime, the Maddalena plain was surveyed for its value and potential development. On the 1865 map by the architect Luigi Errico, the estate is bordered by a ridge running east-west, with a road on the southern side below three – perhaps four – concave recesses. These curved lines, drawn close together with the exception of one facing the opposite direction that seems to open up from the upper edge of the plateau, are similar to deep cuts into the hillside today caused by the collapse of galleries near the surface. Over the course of the twentieth century, some of the quarry mouths would be filled, while others would be newly opened, including the present entrance to the Santa Rufina crypts, described below (fig. 4).

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142 Levi 1962: 137.

143 Wreford 1854: 407. The most damaged areas of the catacomb, in fact, were the galleries above the Santa Rufina crypts, indicating the weakened state of a hillslope with cavities on different levels.

144 Lacerenza 1998: 368 and Lavorano 2015: 195: the property, formerly in the hands of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem, was leased to a Vincenzo Antonelli for quarrying of tuff and sand. Also Astarita 2005, 281 for note of damage to Basili-cata by the earthquake of 1857.

145 Lacerenza 1998: 363.

146 Lacerenza 1998: 363 and Lavorano 2015: 198.

147 Testimony of the property owner, Pasquale Savino, in Lavorano 2015: 191-195.

148 For military occupation of Basilicata after 1861, Astarita 2005: 286. Lavorano 2015: 195-196, notes a brief communica-tion from the regional administrators of the new Savoy administracommunica-tion at Melfi in 1863 requesting detailed informa-tion about the catacomb site and its inscripinforma-tions.

149 Lacerenza 1998: 332, for D’Aloe’s proposal to open «air shafts» in 1853, since the galleries were found «at a little depth» below the hillside. La Vista 1868, quoted at length in Lavorano 2015: 197, decries lack of vigilance at site.

Early Explorations of the Maddalena Hill 161 The first scholarly publication of the Venosa catacombs was issued shortly after the end of the brigand insurrection, in 1867, in the Rome-based Bollettino dell’Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologi-ca.¹⁵⁰ The author, Otto Hirschfeld, a Jewish philologist and one of Mommsen’s collaborators on the CIL, briefly described the inscriptions seen in the catacomb in 1866.¹⁵¹ In this same period, Naples-based scholars sought out the opinions of colleagues on the content and dating of the inscriptions from the site, after two other Jewish catacombs had come to light in Rome on the via Appia, the same ancient road that passed through Venosa.¹⁵² The study of epigraphy was prominent in the mid-nineteenth century because philology, or textual analysis, still dominated the field of Classical scholarship. Together with other forms of archaeological discoveries in Greece, Africa, and the Le-vant, inscriptions made available much new information about different cultures and peoples of the ancient world. Jews were visible among them.¹⁵³ The scholar most active in the publication of the Jewish catacombs at Rome, the Neapolitan-born Jesuit Raffaele Garrucci, member of the now-defunct Accademia Ercolanese, announced in 1866 the imminent publication of the plan and in-scriptions of the Jewish catacomb of Venosa.¹⁵⁴ Conflict and intrigue delayed Garrucci’s project un-til 1883, around the time of a flurry of new studies on the site.¹⁵⁵

The long-awaited analysis of the Venosa inscriptions was communicated in 1878 at the Con-gresso degli Orientalisti in Florence by the Italian Jewish linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli.¹⁵⁶ Ascoli, like Garrucci, had in his possession one of the 1853 catacomb maps, but had not actually seen the ––––––––––––––

150 Lavorano 2015: 196-197 and note 22. Hirschfeld was at Venosa to carry out verifications for the CIL IX in the company of Giuseppe Lioy, corresponding member of the Istituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica in Rome. The Rome-based stitute in the 1860’s was in its final years as an autonomous organization: by the 1870’s, it would become a German in-stitute. It provided scholarships to recent graduates of German universities like Hirschfeld and later Nikolaus Müller to travel in Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean, and had a network of contacts, or corresponding members like Lioy who would report on local finds. For the organization’s history and evolution into today’s Deutsches Archäolo-gisches Institut (DAI): Dyson 2019: 42-44. Also in the works at that time or not long thereafter was an official publica-tion on the Venosa catacombs, to be authored by G. Minervini (topography), G.B. de Rossi (Greek and Latin inscrip-tions), and E. Fabiani (Hebrew inscriptions): Lacerenza 1998: 295, note 6. This was never published.

151 In 1869, Hirschfeld would convert to Christianity in order to obtain a professorship at Göttingen, eventually obtaining Mommsen’s own chair in ancient history at Berlin: Jewish Encyclopedia 1916, coll. 490-491. Ascoli 1880: 272, notes, along with Hirschfeld and Fabiani, a third scholar then occupied with the publication of the Venosa catacomb, an Italian, whom he does not name, but most likely is Garrucci.

152 A number of Jewish inscriptions on marble, nearly all from Rome, already were part of the Naples collection: see cata-logues of Minervini 1855 and Fiorelli 1868. Much later, in 1882, in a report on a visit to Venosa in the company of François Lenormant, Felice Barnabei stressed the loss of «only a couple» of the inscriptions: Barnabei 1881-82: 383. At an unknown point in the late nineteenth century, a ninth-century epitaph in Hebrew from Venosa was taken to the Naples Museum: Lacerenza 2017: 250, catalogue no. 76.

153 Dyson 2006: 17-18, and Cesarini 2012: 208-213, on a rising interest in Orientalism in the study of Greco-Roman civiliza-tion, and awareness of the influence of the eastern civilizations on Roman culture, as manifested in the Isaeum at Pompeii.

154 Garrucci 1866: 176 and id. 1883: 707-720, also note 113 for animosity between Garrucci and Mommsen and other colla-borators on the CIL, including de Rossi in Rome. For the Hebrew readings, Garrucci 1883, 715, seems to have consulted instead the Jewish politician and economist Ludwig Bamberger, resident in Rome in the early 1870’s.

155 Ascoli’s work inspired a flurry of commentaries from leading scholars of Semitic languages and cultures between 1880-1883, including Chwolson, Clermont-Ganneau, Derenbourg, Frankel, Graetz, Kaufmann, and Schurer. CIL IX also was published in 1883, incorporating Hirschfeld’s notes on the site from 1866.

156 Ascoli also communicated with Mommsen about the inscriptions (as Mommsen continued to receive updates on dis-coveries from the D’Errico family at Venosa: Settembrini 2004: 96).

162 Jessica Dello Russo site, and the inscriptions, being panted on plaster, had little chance of being removed. Ascoli’s in-formation on the texts came from the notes and squeezes on file in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, which had been sent to him by Giuseppe Fiorelli and Giulio De Petra, and cor-responding documentation of Fr. Enrico Fabiani, a scholar of Hebrew in Rome, whose own study of the Venosa inscriptions is now lost.¹⁵⁷

Not long after Ascoli’s lecture was printed in 1880, a prominent French scholar of the Near East, Francois Lenormant, published another account of the catacomb and its inscriptions, which he had been able to see in person in the company of the archaeologist Felice Barnabei in 1882.¹⁵⁸ Their reports and other contemporary evidence show precarious conditions in the site. The slope was not particularly suited for agriculture, and remained in private hands, with farmhouses, sto-rage sheds and cisterns near the road.¹⁵⁹ For the next century or so, with a few spurts of digging ac-tivity and inspections, little was done to fix any structural decay. The documentation is concerned instead with fortuitous discoveries and restrictions on building development. For all its unique prospects, the catacomb and its inscriptions remained in “undeserved obscurity” in a remote area of Italy’s south, a region tormented by economic decline and mass emigration.¹⁶⁰

This desolate picture of Southern Italian poverty imparted something of a curse on the site – at least in terms of delays in its publication: as noted recently by Lacerenza, not even a general site description has been prepared.¹⁶¹ In the wake of Lenormant’s visit and Ascoli’s publication, another young German on scholarship came to Venosa in 1884 to prepare a work on the burials of Jews in Italy in antiquity.¹⁶² On this first visit, and, subsequently, in 1887, Nikolas Müller copied the Jewish epitaphs in the catacomb and the Trinità, including one inscription he pieced together from do-zens of fragments.¹⁶³ On a third visit to Venosa in the fall of 1904, as his monograph Die altjüdischen Cömeterien in Italien was nearing completion, he took photographs with magnesium flash of the tomb architecture and inscriptions.¹⁶⁴ En route back to Berlin, Müller was told of the rediscovery of another Jewish catacomb in Rome, in fact, the one seen by Bosio in 1602, which he immediately be-gan to excavate given its precarious condition and fragility of the remains.¹⁶⁵ Müller duly reported on several seasons of digging in Rome (1904-1906), but abruptly died in 1912, leaving his study of ––––––––––––––

157 Fabiani had received copies of forty-eight inscriptions from de Rossi, who in turn had received them from G. Minervi-ni in 1876 (De Rossi 1878: 64 and 97). They were known to other Orientalists including I. Guidi, who convinced FabiaMinervi-ni to send transcriptions of the texts to D. Chwolson for the Corpus Inscriptionum Hebraicarum (1882). See Lacerenza 2019:

279-280, note 7 on the complicated history of this documentation. In 1877, the Italian Ministry of Public Education’s Monuments Division requested an updated list of the catacomb inscriptions: ACS, Ministero dei Lavori Pubblici, Scavi, Monumenti e Gallerie, II. Versamento, I parte, b. 188, f. 105: Sepolcri antichi nella proprietà Lauridia.

158 Lenormant 1883: 215.

159 Recessed openings below the archaeological site have been cut by modern tools.

160 Basilicata did not have archaeological autonomy until 1964: previously, as a division within the Savoy Ministry of Edu-cation, it had been coupled with the Archaeological Superintendence of Salerno and then with that of Apulia.

161 Lacerenza 2019, 275.

162 Lacerenza 2018: 2-3, and Lavorano 2015: 198-199; reference to Venosa, with emphasis on similarities of their layout with those on Melos, in Müller 1901: 807, 844, 856-858. Before 1904, Müller, like many of his contemporaries, had re-lied on squeezes or transcriptions of epitaphs in the site.

163 Müller 1886: 56, figuring also in de Rossi’s notes, though his source is not revealed (possibly Müller). According to La-cerenza 2019: 300, its current location is unknown.

164 Lacerenza 2018 and idem 2019. Luzzatto later claimed he was the first to do so, since Müller’s photographs and those of Briscese had not yet been published.

165 Recent evaluations of Müller’s excavation and documentation of the Monteverde catacombs in Rome in Rossi – Di Mento 2013; Dello Russo 2015; and Lacerenza 2018.

Early Explorations of the Maddalena Hill 163 Jewish catacombs in Italy incomplete.¹⁶⁶ The brief comments on the work in progress in a 1901 en-cyclopedia entry show that Müller was inclined to see the use of catacombs in Italy as Semitic in practice, though “Romanized” in construction.¹⁶⁷ The hybridity of language and culture preserved in the epitaphs also seemed to identify a Hellenic and “highly symbolic” form of Judaism that sur-vived until the first centuries of Christianity. Bits and pieces of Müller’s original project for Venosa at long last saw the light in 2018.¹⁶⁸ But in Müller’s own time, the catacomb continued to be de-scribed in the same general terms as before in reference works like the Jewish Encyclopedia and the Manuel d’archéologie chrétienne.¹⁶⁹ Fifty years of catacomb publications had left much of the ceme-tery undocumented though perilously exposed.