Mille e una Narce. Su un’inedita stagione di scavi nei sepolcreti orientali

The complete perusal of the late 19th and early 20th century files on Narce and its territory kept in the Documents Archive of the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, made it possible to reconstruct a hitherto unpublished season of excavations involving the eastern necropolis of the Faliscan town in the first two decades of the 20th century. These investigations concerned localities such as Monte Cerreto and Contrada Morgi, already extensively explored by Benedetti between 1890 and 1891 and published in the 1894 volume of the Monumenti Antichi dei Lincei on Narce, but were also an opportunity to investigate areas not considered by official excavations before and with no data so far. Six excavation campaigns were carried out between 1903 and 1918 by private excavators under the careful supervision of government overseers in order to avoid a repetition of the scandals concerning the reliability of the grave goods of a few years earlier. In particular, a comparison between the lists of materials acquired by the State and the contents of a large number of boxes kept in the storerooms of the Museo di Villa Giulia made it possible to identify 10 of the 44 grave goods found by Natale Malavolta in the Monte dei Porcari burial ground during the 1917 excavation campaign, which were included in the Museum’s collection but the correct attribution of which had been lost until now. In the light of the new data emerged, the paper intends to present, on a preliminary basis, some objects from the grave goods identified and to provide some brief insights on the funerary landscape and the definition of the Narce settlement in relation to its necropolises.