FSU | Florida State University News Florida State University News The Official News Source of Florida State University Home / News / Arts & Humanities / FSU classics professor leads archaeological dig to explore ancient settlement in Italy A new archaeological expedition led by a team of Florida State University researchers that began in Italy this summer has captured local excitement as the first discoveries from the excavation are revealed to the public co-directed by Professor of Classics Andrea De Giorgi seeks to uncover the history of an ancient Etruscan hilltop settlement that predates settlement by the ancient Romans The project has received a permit for three years with the aim of extending the permit and eventually constructing an accompanying museum and research center “We hope our investigations help to imbue this ancient site with a sense of life our goal is to glean the story of this historical setting then restore the ancient site and present it back to the community.” “We hope our investigations help to imbue this ancient site with a sense of life,” De Giorgi said “Our goal is to glean the story of this historical setting then restore the ancient site and present it back to the community We’re very grateful for the support of the property owners (George M the mayor and the local people who are all very excited about this project.” A team of eight FSU classics graduate students began excavating the site in June using a mix of traditional methods alongside advanced technologies such as ground-penetrating radar The team has already unearthed several discoveries pottery and remnants of a monumental building from the 5th century B.C Located 30 minutes southwest of Florence in Tuscany the hilltop settlement sits along the Arno River near the town of Capraia e Limite The site’s long history of occupation spans from the Etruscan period in the 5th to 3rd centuries B.C to the Romans and continues into the late Middle Ages Research will explore how the site evolved over time harnessing both historical data and modern technology to investigate the transition from the Etruscan period to the Roman era “Montereggi is yet another great opportunity for FSU students to showcase their skills learn about new field techniques and advance their understanding of ancient cultures using state-of-the-art technology,” De Giorgi said “This project will give students the opportunity to put their hands on ancient materials organize collections and help curate an exhibit where our findings will be accessible to the public.” One of the modern techniques employed by the researchers is known as light detection and ranging technology This remote sensing method employs laser light to measure distances and create detailed topographic maps and 3D models to detect buildings and architectural structures beneath the soil for excavation Dig sites such as Montereggi offer valuable professional experiences for students aiming for careers in academia or museum curation Hands-on work with archaeological practices and technologies is essential for researchers and leads to opportunities for publications from doctoral dissertations to journal articles and books future curators gain crucial experience in handling ancient materials and organizing collections for display “The Montereggi Archaeological Project builds on our department’s long history of involvement in archaeological projects in Italy,” said Tim Stover professor and chair of the FSU Department of Classics “Professor De Giorgi will provide invaluable experiences for our students who will get hands-on training while working at the site The project enhances the department’s reputation as a leader in the study of the art and archaeology of ancient Italy while opening up a world of exciting possibilities for our students.”  Thanks to a concession from the Italian Ministry of Culture to FSU and support from private benefactor George McCarroll Rapier III the Montereggi Archaeological Project will continue year-round through 2026 with the goal of extending the permit length increasing the number of students working at the dig site and eventually creating a public space at the site by establishing an exhibit on the property Students departed the site in July and will return in cycles and they will work alongside co-director Agnese Pittari of Italy This is the third active Italian dig site for the FSU classics department FSU began excavations at Cetamura del Chianti and in 2013 a dig began at Cosa in Chianti which De Giorgi has co-directed since its inception “The local community quickly adopted our FSU students some of whom are having their first experience abroad but are becoming integrated into this community in Italy,” De Giorgi said “I was born and raised in Italy and now live in Tallahassee so it means the world to me to see our FSU students adapting to the pace and lifestyle of Italy and to be welcomed into the local community.” To learn more about De Giorgi’s work and research in FSU’s Department of Classics, visit classics.fsu.edu © Florida State University Tallahassee You don't have permission to access the page you requested What is this page?The website you are visiting is protected.For security reasons this page cannot be displayed the Italian government expanded the boundaries of Chianti to incorporate neighbouring territories where grapes and chianti-style wines had long been produced four years after the enactment of the Italian DOC system (Denominazione di Origine Controllata) the first official Chianti DOC was created including seven sub-zones: Colli Fiorentini The entire area was elevated to DOCG status in 1984 and Chianti Classico DOCG became its own distinct denomination Terre di Vinci: Chianti DOCG’s new sub-zone The new sub-zone will be called Terre di Vinci and consist of four municipalities in the province of Florence: Vinci (birthplace and childhood home of Leonardo da Vinci) and Capraia e Limite; all of which are currently part of the basic Chianti appellation ‘This is a positive development for the area of Terre di Vinci and indeed for all of Chianti,’ said Giovanni Busi ‘The desire to create a sub-zone demonstrates a strong initiative on the part of the producers to showcase their particular area It also indicates a willingness to strive for an even higher level of quality because the regulations for sub-zones are stricter than those of the basic appellation.’ ‘Chianti is way too generic,’ says Alberto Antonini who grew up on his family’s wine estate called Poggiotondo in Cerreto Guidi which he now runs with his wife Alessandra while also managing a career as a high-profile international consultant oenologist ‘Any good wine must demonstrate the unique characteristics of where it comes from and consumers should be able to discern its specific place of origin.’ Located in the northwestern part of the Chianti DOCG the area of Terre di Vinci occupies a unique winegrowing enclave averaging about 150 metres above sea level with gentle slopes and temperate breezes from the Mediterranean Sea There is also a particular soil configuration that combines limestone with layered clay and abundant deposits of marine fossils ‘has the potential to produce terroir-driven wines that combine tension and vibrancy with richness In addition to terroir and a longstanding viticultural tradition there is also the cultural cachet of producing wine from the home turf of one of the great masterminds of the Renaissance Alberto Antonini is one of a small group of producers who formed an association to create a sub-zone in the area of Vinci The association submitted a proposal to the Chianti Consorzio several years ago shortly before the outbreak of the COVID pandemic A committee was formed to review the proposal and it was passed The proposed sub-zone was then ratified by a majority of Vino Chianti growers producers and bottlers; notification of the initiative was published in the official gazette and a formal request for modification of the denomination was submitted to the Italian Minister of Agriculture Once the Terre di Vinci sub-zone is approved by the Minister it will be sent to the EU authorities for final ratification but it is bound to happen – possibly even in time for the 2022 vintage As subzone wines generally require a longer maturation period prior to release even if official approval takes a year or two the new sub-zone category could still be retroactively applied to the 2022 Chianti Terre di Vinci While there is excitement and anticipation in the area of Vinci there is no hurry: ‘I’ve been waiting over ten years for this,’ said Antonini But a new subzone is not the only development taking place in Chianti Included in the package of proposed modifications sent to the Minister of Agriculture is a request to add a Gran Selezione category to the Vino Chianti DOCG Disciplinare While Consortium President Busi declined to discuss details until official approval is received he indicated that the Vino Chianti Gran Selezione category which occupies the pinnacle of the quality pyramid would be very similar to the one that Chianti Classico inaugurated in 2014 (starting with the 2010 vintage) Expect extended maturation before release, a higher percentage of Sangiovese, lower yields per hectare, exclusively estate-grown grapes and higher minimal alcohol by volume. Also, just as the new UGAs of Chianti Classico apply only to Gran Selezione it is probable that the new Chianti DOCG Gran Selezione will apply only to the sub-zones of the greater Chianti area – including the brand-new Terre di Vinci In 1874, when the great Macchiaioli artist Telemaco Signorini (Florence one of the most celebrated products of his brush for the third time exactly ten years after its creation the reception it received was not the most benevolent his painting was panned by a terribly negative review published in the columns of La Stampa and signed by Guglielmo Stella (Milan since Stella did not look favorably on the school of the Macchiaioli both stylistic (the Macchiaioli were seen somewhat as the corrupters of the realist school) and content-related (Signorini often dealt with themes of social denunciation The Florentine painter had shown the painting for the first time the same year it was made in 1864 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence at the exhibition of the Florentine Promoting Society: in fact the artist believed that the time was ripe for wider appreciation He was wrong: the exceptional scope of the painting one of the most modern and innovative of that season quite clearly troubled Guglielmo Stella’s soul And his demolition of thetowpath was total The first considerations concerned the style of Signorini’s work “The picture he exhibited,” Stella wrote often sad and desolating; the grace of the lines things of no importance; the coloring very little care; one thing accurate; one thought dominant the novelty of the general impression and the value of the different tones obtained And if the public does not like them so much the better: what do those poor boors know Art is all made for the adepts who made the palate for the gray and indefinite paintings that would have pretended to represent the modern resurgence.” As for the scene depicted and its symbolic value the Venetian painter asserted that “it produces a most distressing impression and by the subject and the manner of expressing it but from the philosophical side it aspires to a certain elevation and achieves it from a certain point of view but in our opinion art lends itself very poorly to certain philosophical-humanitarian demonstrations to soften and to produce agreeable impressions.” Signorini’s reaction and the artist responded by publishing an article in the Venetian newspaper Il Rinnovamento he implied that Stella should have appreciated his work since the Venetian artist was going on to argue that a good painter should sincerely refer to nature: Signorini the only characteristic he had in common with that Gustave Courbet (Ornans 1877) to whom Stella had compared him (Signorini wrote that Stella did not know Courbet’s art that there was another analogy with Gustave Courbet’s art: the character of social criticism that Thetowpath necessarily assumed on the banks of the Arno near the Cascine Park on the outskirts of Florence Describing the subject is Signorini himself in a letter sent in 1892 to the president of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence (a piece of writing that is extremely useful for reconstructing the artist’s entire biography up to that time): “in 1864 I did a painting of my greatest with many figures almost life-like pulling a boat against the current of the Arno exhibited at the Vienna International Exhibition it earned me a medal.” The painting’s protagonists are five tan-skinned characters bent over with fatigue: they are five towpaths This term designated the rope needed forhauling the custom of dragging boats up the waters of a river on the shoulder from the shore: it happened when there was no favorable wind or when the ship was not equipped with oars There were special walkways on the banks of the river that had to guide the towpath workers the “alzaioli.” It was extremely strenuous work since the men called to practice it almost lost their dignity art historian Rossella Campana has written Signorini “chose as his central theme the world of labor in its most archaic form that of Tuscany before the Unification of Italy which was still governed by primordial laws: the latter had not yet been modified by the progress and mechanization of the industrial age.” Commentators have noted how Signorini was deeply influenced by the writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Besançon the French philosopher had spoken of social justice I am often made to reflect on the wrong I had in not reading him before now it seems to me that if a man does not acquire the sense of righteousness after reading this author it means that in himself there has never been even the germ of a gentleman." The work to which the artist refers is De la justice dans la révolution et dans l’église but we know that as early as 1855 Signorini had begun reading Proudhon and his desire to propose art that was also denunciatory was itself a reflection of such readings: Proudhon had also written a short pamphlet titled Du principe de lart et de sa destination sociale in which the author posed the problem of the social role of art asserting that the purpose of art should beutility (underlying the treatise was the idea of “reconciling art with the just and the useful”) is but an “idealistic representation of nature and ourselves with a view to the physical and moral perfection of our species.” In order to make his denunciation even stronger Signorini included a decidedly strong detail in the painting: in the background we see walking along holding the hand of a little girl who remains between the two and the lifters with the sun illuminating the first buildings of Florence help to accentuate this contrast that is a symptom of obvious social injustice: they are not in the least affected by what is happening behind them; on the contrary The light itself is a further element of denunciation: it is a terse light which in accordance with Macchiaioli poetics creates strong contrasts between light and shadow and which here gives rise to backlighting effects that throw the tried faces of the lifters into darkness: it is a highly symbolic device since with the light that does not help us to distinguish their faces it is as if their personalities are cancelled out oppressed and destroyed by that strenuous work Note then the hand gestures of the last two: one wipes off his sweat but almost seems to rest his face on his disconsolate back while the other tries to brush against the rope to help himself Signorini’s five risers are a monument to fatigue “They seem photographed from life,” reads an 1873 review Art historian Vincenzo Farinella has pointed out how Signorini may have been inspired by theJapanese art of Utagawa Hiroshige (Edo bolstered in part by a stay in Paris in 1861 (the fashion for Japonisme had already spread to the French capital) so risky from the compositional and chromatic point of view,” the scholar wrote “can only be explained by assuming that Japanese prints had fallen into Signorini’s hands.” And this is not only because of certain solutions such as the sharp contrasts that make us think of the two-dimensionality of Japanese works The idea of the sharply lowered point of view may come from knowledge of a print by Hiroshige known as Takanawa Ushimachi (“View of Ushimachi in Takanawa Prefecture”) where the viewer is imagined so far down that the horizon ends up very close to the lower edge of the composition The same is true of Haneda no watashi Benten no yashiro (“Haneda Ferry and Benten Shrine”) where similar are the details on the riverbank and even the tightrope motif seems almost to have a direct derivation another source for Signorini could be a slightly earlier painting the Renaioli dell’Arno by Stanislao Pointeau (Florence another Macchiaiolo who set his composition in a sunny countryside struck by a warm and violent light such that it again creates marked contrasts on the terrain from the river landscape and on the waters of the Arno itself Telemaco Signorini’s painting is held in a private collection (it went to auction in 2003 at Sotheby’s for nearly three million pounds) but a photographic reproduction can be found at the Museum of Boating and Rowing in Limite sull’Arno many of the hoists (the “damned of the river,” as they are described in the museum’s panels) came from this village on the banks of the Arno which lies just beyond Empoli and was once one of Italy’s most important centers of shipbuilding: only a few shipyards survive today and they are mainly active in pleasure boating but when Telemaco Signorini was painting his works was second only to that of Viareggio and was more abundant than that of Livorno and Porto Santo Stefano Production was favored by the presence of lush forests that covered the Montalbano area the border zone between the Arno valley and the Pistoia hills This was an almost inexhaustible source of timber particularly suitable for ship carpentry: whole families of woodcutters rented portions of the forest and obtained from it the construction timber that they would then put on the market to meet the needs of the shipwrights the highly skilled workers who were able to process the material in such a way as to make it suitable for boat building (the Limone shipwrights were famous throughout Italy for their great skill) In the period of maximum production intensity brigantines whose capacity exceeded two hundred tons also came out of the Limone shipyards that were the boats peculiar to Limite sull’Arno as well as the type most frequently produced by the local shipyards is now dedicated to the workers employed in the construction and transportation of navicelli These were boats suitable for river navigation: at one time the Arno was navigable and was the preferred transport channel for building materials and foodstuffs arrived easily and quickly from the coast to Florence or vice versa (only the advent of railways in the mid-19th century would mark the beginning of the decline of river transport) had been built since before the seventeenth century It had a capacity ranging from thirty to seventy tons as well as two main sails: the work of the hoists was often necessary to transport them when it was necessary for the boat to go upriver against the current) it became the only way to drag the navicelli over the waters of the Arno and the efforts of those who worked on the production and transport of the boats (shipwrights and the alzaioli themselves) are an integral part of the itinerary of the Limite sull’Arno Shipbuilding Museum A museum where it is possible to hear these stories of work and toil from those who have always lived in the shipyards Limite’s is a community that knows the value of sacrifice strongly rooted in its traditions and its territory a new season had opened in Telemaco Signorini’s career: in fact the artist had begun to break away from the "strong>macchia" to embrace a painting of a more international scope attentive to the innovations that had come from France The work would later gain posthumous recognition: in 1928 The portrait of a village that still seems out of this world and out of time thus entered the most up-to-date of artistic contexts and became almost a sort of counterbalance to thetowpath would have offered more than one cue to other artists: another painter of the time painted the towmen in a painting of a homologous subject since the painter had placed himself in front of the workers so that the frame also included the boat dragged on their shoulders reproduced in a photograph in the Museum of Shipbuilding and Rowing in Limite sull’Arno a work with a less innovative character: Tommasi seemed almost to want to emend it from the strong charge of social criticism that had instead distinguished Telemaco Signorini’s painting Which remains one of the most political paintings of 19th-century Italy one almost seems to hear the chirping of the cicadas the rustling of the foliage as the wind passes the earth stirred by the passage of the hoists the sound of the water ploughed by the boat they are pulling Without forgetting that previously Nespoli had won the time trial from Capraia e Limite in Tuscany, and the Italian team time trial championship in Treviso. Our newspaper has officially become media partner of the Museo Diffuso Empolese Valdelsa (MuDEV) a museum system that brings together twenty-one museums in eleven municipalities in the heart of Tuscany: Capraia e Limite Montelupo Fiorentino Montespertoli and Vinci Finestre sull’Arte will therefore have an eye on what happens in the museums of this corner of Tuscany: the agreement will last for a year.We have decided to become a media partner of MuDEV because we are convinced that the principles that inspire our project are in line with the goals that MuDEV sets for itself: as scientific director Cinzia Compalati reminded us at the time of her appointment it is about involving the community in museum practices weaving relationships and talking to different audiences even those who do not frequent museums and cultural settings MuDEV is a project about an area that relies on a valuable heritage that is almost intact and waiting to be explored by a steadily growing public we will continue to do our “traditional” work: doing quality dissemination to let our audience discover the artistic excellence of the territory we invite you to like the official Facebook page of the Museo Diffuso Empolese Valdelsa and to become followers of the Instagram account: every day curiosities news and images from the twenty-one museums that make up the MuDEV Capraia and Limite: Shipbuilding and Rowing Exhibition Center Castelfiorentino: Museum of Santa Verdiana BeGo Museum Benozzo Gozzoli Cerreto Guidi: MuMeLoc - Museum of Local Memory Certaldo: Casa di Boccaccio Museo del Chiodo Empoli: Museo della Collegiata MUVE - Museo del Vetro Fucecchio: Civic Museum Gambassi Terme: Permanent exhibition of glass Montaione: Jerusalem of San Vivaldo Civic Museum Montelupo Fiorentino: Museum of Ceramics Archaeological Museum Montespertoli: Museum of Sacred Art Museum of Vine and Wine Vinci: Museo Leonardiano