Giovanni Patroni

Giovanni Patroni (born September 20, 1869 in Naples , † August 13, 1951 in Rome ) was an Italian archaeologist who held the chair of archeology at the University of Pavia and at the University of Milan .

life and work

In Rome, he first studied at the Scuola superiore d'archeologica , worked in Greece for a year and became Ispettore and director of the Amministrazione delle Antichità (scavi e musei) , the antiquities administration responsible for excavations and museums, then in 1897 private lecturer . He studied with Emanuele Loewy . In 1901 he was appointed to Pavia , initially as an associate professor and since 1905 as a professor. But he kept his position as director of the antiquities administration. In this way, what is avoided today, the functions of evaluation and protection of archaeological monuments on the one hand and teaching and research on the other hand were combined in one person. In 1927 he received a professorship at the University of Milan, where he founded the archaeological institute. He became a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei and the Istituto Lombardo di Scienze e Lettere . To this end, he wrote a series of entries for the Enciclopedia Italiana Treccani . In the first few years the institute was faced with considerable financial problems, from which it was only able to free itself in the course of the 1930s. But it was not until the university year 1936/37 that he was able to hire an assistant for the first time, which was soon followed by Dalma Folco Carozzi , who did his doctorate with a thesis on Pompeii. Patroni published not only in journals and encyclopedias, but also in the press, especially in Il Popolo d'Italia . Patroni retired in 1940, and was followed by the classical archaeologist Alberto De Capitani d'Arzago from 1941 to 1943 .

His work, which was influential until the 1950s, was supported by the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini , as Patroni projected his social ideals back into the prehistoric and ancient past. This related, for example, to the fascist regime's idea of ​​the primacy of Roman Italy in the development of classical culture.

Patroni was close to the regime's historical doctrine of the superiority of Roman culture in a specific way. In his work Le origini preistoriche d'Italia e il suo destino storico , published in 1927 , he presented a teleological work that placed prehistory and early history in the service of contemporary questions. This was shown even more clearly in his work La preistoria, published in Milan in 1937 . In it he dealt with the Terramare culture , the Villanova culture and the Etruscans . The relative homogeneity of the necropolis of the Terramare culture led Patroni to assume that the associated society was of an egalitarian nature and did not have any individual land ownership. He also suspected that the digging of trenches, the extensive reclamation tasks, ie above all deforestation, and the maintenance of the roads had been carried out by them in joint work. The fascist historiography of the time, which emphasized authority, corporatism and private property as culture-forming, therefore emphasized the superiority of the more hierarchically organized Villanova culture. They "riposa evidentemente sul lavoro e sulla proprietà individuale", as it was called in the encoded expression pattern of the fascist era, which Patroni took over in his 2nd volume on prehistory. Although there were signs of continuity between the two cultures, the source of the superiority of the Villanovians was "a cult of individuality and property, of which no example can be found or will be found in the walled pile-dwelling settlements".

In addition, not only did the regime project its social positions into the past, but Patroni also discredited the egalitarian prehistoric society as backward, superstitious, uneducated and immoral. She also lacked a sense of family and piety. Since there was neither a prominent grave nor a larger hut, Patroni concluded that there had been no head of the villages, whereas either the elderly or the stronger had come together and tyrannically disposed of the work of the individual. Nor would they have known any priesthood. This way of life and, as a result, a diffuse “esaurimento” (exhaustion) were the reason why the settlements were abandoned and the people emigrated.

In 1937 Patroni created the term “Protovillanova” and linked the appearance of the cremation burial grounds with the arrival of Indo-European speaking groups from the Balkan-Danube region across the Adriatic . In them he saw in turn the direct ancestors of the bearers of the Early Iron Age Italian Villanova culture. These theses of ethnically based cultural superiority, however, became obsolete through later research. They showed that complex cultures existed long before immigration. In addition, the ethnic interpretation itself became considerably more complex, immigrants from the Middle East, who were much more refusing, came into focus, the emergence of ethnic groups is depicted completely differently.

Even after the war, Patroni was still influential. When Massimo Pallottino , who has held the chair of Etruscology at the University of Rome since 1946, in his 1947 work L'origine degli Etruschi, his 1942 demand to say goodbye to metaphysical assumptions and to stick to scientific data, Patroni attacked him sharply because, in his opinion, he lost sight of the question of the origin. In 1951 Patroni was able to republish his revised edition of the 1937 text in the places mentioned without any changes.

The Museo Civico Archeologico "Giovanni Patroni" in Pula , Cagliari is named after him.

Publications (selection)

• Di una nuova orientazione dell 'archeologia nel più recente movimento scientifico. In: Rendiconti della Accademia dei Lincei Ser. 5, 8 (1899), pp. 221-240.
• Scavi e scoperte archeologiche nell'Italia del Nord. Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome 1908.
• Architettura preistorica generale ed italica. Architettura etrusca. Istituto italiano d'arti grafiche, Bergamo 1941
• La preistoria , 2 vol., Vallardi, Milan 1937 (= Storia politica d'Italia dalle origini ai giorni nostri), 2nd edition aggiornata e riveduta , Vallardi, Milan 1951 (= Storia politica d'Italia dalle origini ai giorni nostri Vol. 1, part 1–2).
• Studi di mitologia mediterranea ed omerica. Hoepli, Milan 1951
• Commenti mediterranei all'Odissea di Omero. Marzorati, Milan 1950

literature

• Plinio Fraccaro: Giovanni Patroni. In: Studi Etruschi Ser. 2, 21 (1950-51) pp. 498-500.
• Giulio Quirino Giglioli : Giovanni Patroni. In: Archeologia classica 3 (1951) pp. 242-244.
• Giovanni Lilliu: Giovanni Patroni. In: Studi Sardi 10-11 (1952) pp. 609-616.
• Silvio Accame: La "breve disputa" sull'archeologia di G. De Sanctis e di G. Patroni. In: Nona miscellanea greca e romana. Rome 1984, pp. 343-356.
• Fabrizio Slavazzi: "Io [...] ho perduta tutta la mia biblioteca". Una lettera di Paolo Orsi a Giovanni Patroni ei rapporti fra i due archeologi. In: Acme. Annali della Facoltà di lettere e filosofia dell'Università degli studi di Milano 53 (2000) pp. 279–294.
• Fabrizzio Slavazzi: Giovanni Patroni: gli anni milanesi. In: Pier Giuseppe Michelotto (ed.): Lógios anēr. Studi di antichità in memoria di Mario Attilio Levi. Milan 2002, pp. 449-467.
• Marcello Barbera: Contributo a una geneaologia degli archeologiitaliani tra Ottocento e Novecento: il caso di Pavia. In: Giancarlo Mazzoli (ed.): Anniversari dell'antichistica pavese. Cisalpino, Milan 2009, pp. 43-45.
• Fabrizio Vistoli, sv: “Patroni Giovanni” , in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani , vol. 81, Rome, Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2014, pp. 742-744.

Web links

• I professori dell'Università di Pavia 1859–1961

Remarks

1. ↑ Gemma Sena Chiesa: Gli inizi e gli anni Trenta: il periodo di Giovanni Patroni , in: Gemma Sena Chiesa, Claudio Gallazzi, Giovanni Benedetto (ed.): L'antichistica. L'Istituto di Archeologia dal 1924 agli anni Ottanta: un percorso fra attività di formazione e ricerca scientifica , In: Annali di storia delle università italiane 11 (2007) 153ff., Here: p. 153.
2. ↑ "... certamente inserito nel progetto del governo di fascista Ricupero Dell'Idea del primato dell'Italia romana nello sviluppo della civiltà classica". Gemma Sena Chiesa: Gli inizi e gli anni Trenta: il periodo di Giovanni Patroni , in: Gemma Sena Chiesa, Claudio Gallazzi, Giovanni Benedetto (ed.): L'antichistica. L'Istituto di Archeologia dal 1924 agli anni Ottanta: un percorso fra attività di formazione e ricerca scientifica , In: Annali di storia delle università italiane 11 (2007) 153ff., Here: p. 154 full text .
3. ↑ "La sua adesione alla direttive culturali del regime volte a evidenziare anche negli studi archeologici il primato di Roma e dei popoli italici" (Gemma Sena Chiesa: Gli inizi e gli anni Trenta: il periodo di Giovanni Patroni , in: Gemma Sena Chiesa, Claudio Gallazzi, Giovanni Benedetto (ed.): L'antichistica. L'Istituto di Archeologia dal 1924 agli anni Ottanta: un percorso fra attività di formazione e ricerca scientifica , In: Annali di storia delle università italiane 11 (2007) 153ff., here: p. 155).
4. ^ Giovanni Patroni: La preistoria , Milan 1937, vol. 2, p. 878.
5. ^ Giovanni Patroni: La preistoria , Milan 1937, vol. 2, p. 878.
6. ^ Giovanni Patroni: La preistoria , Milan 1937, vol. 2, p. 876.
7. ^ Giovanni Patroni: La preistoria , Milan 1937, vol. 2, p. 877.
8. ^ Giovanni Patroni: La preistoria , Milan 1937, vol. 2, p. 877.
9. ^ Giovanni Patroni: La preistoria , Milan 1937, vol. 2, p. 709.
10. ^ Massimo Pallottino: Storia della prima Italia , Milan 1984, A History of Earliest Italy , engl. Translation in Routledge 1991, p. 28.
11. ↑ So also in: L'origine degli Etruschi , in: Antiquitas 2 (1947) 75–96.
12. ↑ Dominique Briquel: Pallottino e le origini etrusche , in: Laura M. Michetti (Ed.): Massimo Pallottino a dieci anni dalla scomparsa, Atti dell'Incontro di Studio Roma 10-11 November 2005 , Rome 2007, pp. 30 and 36 .
13. ↑ Carlo D'Adamo: dell'archeologia Disavventure. I comunisti delle terremare , Bologna 2011, p. 19.