SALOTTO ETRUSCO

22 April 2024 – 18.00

Yvonne Backe Forsberg & Richard Holmgren
”San Giovenale – the discovery of a new urban area, its wine and Italy’s oldest bridge”

Through almost seventy years, the excavations at the Etruscan site of San Giovenale have focused on funeral and settlement remains. However, a fundamental area within the site had still not undergone the inquiry for a complete understanding of the site as a whole. This evening’s event will have a talk with the authors about their newly published book What’s beyond the Etruscan bridge? It aims to answer the question of what’s hidden on the Acropolis’ sister plateau, the Vignale hill. Based on diary entries from the 1950s, as well as recent ground- and aerial remote sensing surveys, a new urban area has emerged. Vignale was also associated to wine production over time, where the site’s infrastructure connected various entities. One example is the newly documented remains of a wooden bridge, which is still under investigation. It can represent the oldest bridge found to date in Italy and may provide exciting architectural evidence of this thirty-meter-long overpass.

Yvonne Backe Forsberg defended her doctoral thesis Crossing the Bridge at the department of Archaeology and Ancient history, Uppsala University. As a senior Etruscologist at the Swedish Institute of Classical Studies in Rome she continues to publish articles on Etruscan culture.

Richard Holmgren is the founder of the company ARCDOC, which have focused on archaeological documentation in Europe, the Middle East and the Caucasus since 1990. Missions of excavation have for example included the ancient city of Petra and administrating the Swedish Dead Sea Expedition.

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