The discovery, in the sacred baths of the San Casciano dei Bagni archaeological site near Siena, is one of the most important ever made in the Mediterranean and certainly the most important since the 1972 underwater discovery of the famous Riace bronze warriors, said Massimo Osanna. Director of Museums of the Ministry of Culture. Thanks to the mud that protected them, the two dozen figurines and other bronze objects were found in a perfect state of preservation, bearing delicate facial features, inscriptions and wavy tunics. Next to the figures were 5,000 gold, silver and copper coins, the ministry said. As a testament to the importance of the find, the ministry announced the construction of a new museum in the area to house the antiquities. Jacopo Tabolli, who coordinated the dig for the University for Foreigners in Siena, said the discovery was important because it sheds new light on the end of the Etruscan civilization and the expansion of the Roman Empire into what is now central Italy between the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. X. The period was marked by wars and conflicts in the present-day regions of Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio, and yet, bronze statues show that Etruscan and Roman families prayed together to deities in the sacred sanctuary of the thermal springs. The statues, including depictions of Apollo and Igea, the ancient Greek god and goddess of health, bear Etruscan and Latin inscriptions. “While social and civil wars were going on outside the sanctuary… inside the sanctuary, the great elite Etruscan and Roman families were praying together in a context of peace surrounded by conflict,” Tabolli said. “This possibility to rewrite the relationship and the dialectic between the Etruscans and the Romans is an extraordinary opportunity.” The story continues Some of the two dozen bronzes are entire human figures of deities, while others are individual body parts and organs that would have been offered as offerings to the gods for intervention for medical treatments through the spa waters, the ministry said. a statement. “This is almost an X-ray of the human interior from the lungs to the intestines,” Osanna said, gesturing to a lung in the restoration lab where the bronzes are cured. “There are ears and other anatomical parts like hands. So all those things that the healing waters and the intervention of the deities could save.” The find represents the largest copper hoard of this era in Italy, also notable because most surviving antiquities from the period are found mainly in terracotta, the ministry said. “It is a discovery that will rewrite history,” Tabolli said in a statement. The discovery comes 50 years after the Riace bronze warriors were found by a recreational diver in the waters off southern Calabria and became one of Italy’s most impressive archaeological finds. The 5th-century bronzes, currently on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Reggio Calabria, show two life-sized and life-sized nude Greek warriors with rippling muscles and intricate, curly beards.
