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Paolo Orsi Regional Archaeological Museum of Syracuse verified

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closed The reign of the dead people

The show

The exhibition The kingdom of dead people will be inaugurated on Saturday 8 October at 5.30 pm at the “Paolo Orsi” museum in Syracuse. The southern necropolis of Megara Hyblaea.

The exhibition aims to be a new opportunity to illustrate the long collaboration between the French archaeological mission in Megara Hyblaea and the Paolo Orsi Regional Archaeological Museum in Syracuse. This is an exceptional opportunity to present the finds from the excavations of the southern necropolis of Megara Hyblaea, kept in the Museum and of which only a small part had been exhibited so far. It tries to trace both some aspects of the life and death of the ancient Greeks of this famous Sicilian city, and the work of the archaeologist who studied them.

The site of Megara Hyblaea, 20 km north of Syracuse, was occupied by the Greeks from the second half of the eighth century BC Less than three centuries later, at the beginning of the fifth century BC, the city was taken by Gelone, tyrant of Syracuse, which moved its inhabitants. The evacuees returned later occupying the area of the old agora but it was the political end of a Greek city that grew up in parallel with Syracuse to the point of opposing it and destined to be abandoned.

This fate has made the fortune of archaeologists who since the time of Paolo Orsi at the end of the nineteenth century have had the opportunity to investigate a site without overlapping modern times. In 1949, Luigi Bernabò Brea, Superintendent of Antiquities for Eastern Sicily, entrusted the research to the École française de Rome. Georges Vallet and François Villard, and later their collaborators and successors, have carried out investigations of the city and the necropolis to this day.

After the fortuitous discovery in 1940 of the famous Sombrotidas kouros , exhibited in the exhibition, attention shifted to the southern necropolis of the city, threatened by the development of the industrial area. The emergency interventions conducted by the Archaeological Superintendence for Eastern Sicily and the École française de Rome in particular in the years 1970-1974, allowed the excavation and study of about 700 tombs.

The exhibition, divided into seven sections, illustrates the results of investigations attentive to all aspects related to burial in the Archaic Greek age: personal objects, pottery, jewelry, exhibited for the first time, tell visitors about a segment of the life of the inhabitants of the Greek polis . by Megara Hyblaea. The catalog admirably edited at the same time as the inauguration of the exhibition is an in-depth study of the themes addressed in the exhibition itinerary.

"Thanks to this exhibition - says Antonio Mamo, director of the Archaeological Park of Syracuse - it will be possible to understand the various types of burials, the function of the objects deposited, the funeral treatment reserved for the children of the megarese colony, thanks to a complete study of how much the time saved. A collaboration, the one with the team of the École française de Rome , strengthened thanks to this scientific work that will certainly win the favor of both sector scholars and the general public ”.

The exhibition is curated by Reine Marie Bérard, researcher at the Center Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique and by Anita Crispino, official archaeologist of the Park.

It will close on January 8, 2023.

The reign of the dead people . The southern necropolis of Megara Hyblaea.

Syracuse, "Paolo Orsi" regional archaeological museum

9 October 2022 - 8 January 2023

Hours: Tuesday to Saturday 9 am-6pm

Sundays and holidays 9 am-1pm

Free entry

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Viale Teocrito, 66,
96100 Syracuse

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