S.and 2021 was Dante’s anniversary, this is the year of the great archaeologists, courageous pioneers, heroes of a science that seeks immortality. Let’s name the names right away. Jean-Franςoislike the French enfant prodige Champollion that exactly two centuries ago he managed to decipher the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta stonebeating the English who, after winning Bonaparte, had taken possession of the famous black plaque and were studying it too. Howard, like the stubborn one Egyptologist Carter who, by convincing his financier Lord Carnarvon to still trust him after years of failure, just 100 years ago he found the stairs leading to the tomb of the most famous pharaoh of all time, the young man Tutankhamununleashing the fashion of double-layered eyes and Cleopatra-style jewels in 1922.
Heinrich Schliemann, passion and obsession
And especially Heinrich, born in 1822 (yes, this year we also celebrate the bicentenary of his birth!)or rather the very adventurous and passionate German “amateur” Schliemannmocked by professors, who managed to find Troy in Turkey, on the hill of Hissarlik, simply “trusting” Homer and believing in his dream, which began when his father read the Iliad to him as a child.
One of the gates of Troy (UNESCO World Heritage List, 1998), seen from the north-east during Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations in June 1873. Engraving. (Photo by DeAgostini / Getty Images)
Even Agatha Christie, we know, it will not be immune from the fascination of archeology, from the idea of digging in search of lost treasures. She said: “An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have: the older she gets, the more interesting it becomes for him!” She will marry in second marriage Max Mallowana younger archaeologist of her, and will work alongside her to recover beautiful ivory artifacts in Nimrud (now Iraq), sacrificing her precious face cream to gently cleanse them. She will be so inspired by it that she will set some beautiful adventures of her Poirot in similar exotic contexts (the remake of Murder on the Nilestarring and directed by Kenneth Branagh, will be in Italian cinemas in February).
The wives of the archaeologist
Just as Agatha worked brush and brush alongside her Max, so too Schliemann, discovering what will be called Priam’s treasure in Troy, had at her side his second wife, the Greek Sophie, thirty years younger than him. She will be the one to model and wear the famous diademthe pendants, the necklaces, in a photo that will go around the world.
Sophie Schliemann, née Sophia Engastromenos, 1852-1932, wife of Heinrich Schliemann, Woodcut from 1892. (Photo by: Bildagentur-online / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Heinrich had already been married for the first time in his youth to a Russian peer, daughter of merchants, Ekaterina, but despite the three children they had together, Sergei, Natalia and Nadezhda, they later divorced. The Russian was a traditional wife, she did not like the classics and suffered from the very long distances of her globetrotting husband. The Greek Sophie, whom Schliemann had married at 17, when he was 47, was made of a completely different dough: she knew Homer by heart and the gold from Priam’s treasure she had collected in her shawl, after digging on her knees beside her husband, using her hands and a knife. She, that husband to whom she would have given two children, called Andromache and Agamemnon (well …) she really adored him and shared her passions.
Schliemann: a reckless life
After all Schliemann to discover the Homeric city had arrived after a very adventurous life of travel and shipwrecks to which he survives by a miracle, sledding expeditions in the Russia of the Tsars in extreme conditions, a gold rush to Uncle Scrooge among bandits, epidemics and mosquitoes and so on and so forth. Born poor but gifted (will come to speak seven languages, learning them on his own), makes his fortune with the Crimean War, selling indigo blue to color uniforms, the first rifles, canned food for soldiers. He trades cotton when the Civil War devastates the American fields and acts as an intermediary in California between banks and gold miners, sleeping for months with his boots on and his hand on his gun like a perfect sheriff to High noon. The young man with the round glasses has a specific goal: to become rich. Because? But to be able to self-finance the discovery of Troy, the Homeric city that he is convinced really exists!
He will make it at the age of fifty, leaving everyone who had thought him a crazy mythomaniac in awe, taking a resounding revenge on the contempt of academics. And once he becomes famous, he will continue to dig elsewhere, in search of other wonders.
An all-Italian scoop
In fact, even if few know it, Heinrich Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, carried out archaeological research in Italy, in the wonderful context of the island of Mozia, in Sicily, near where Garibaldi landed with the Thousand. In 1875, when he arrived there in October, they still call it San Pantaleo, e not all scholars believe that this is really the ancient city of the Phoenicians destroyed by the Syracusans. But as usual he does not allow himself to be discouraged by skepticism, by the bureaucratic hindrances of that Sicily recently unified in the young Kingdom of Italy and by bad weather: he hires local workers, gets to work and between thefts
The man of the dream by Marina Marazza. Solferino160 pages – 15 euros
This is the story I tell in my novel The man of the dreamthe release on January 27 for Solferino. In the book, dedicated to younger readers, the German VIP, returning from the great success of the finding of Troy, meets an orphaned boy from Motyabent by the hardships of his condition, and with the example of his life spent with enthusiasm to fulfill his dream, he returns the desire not to give up: a gigantic “can be done” for all our children and grandchildren tried by experience of the pandemic and also the reconstruction of an exciting piece of nineteenth-century history to get to know the (real) man who inspired Indiana Jones.
It can be done!
And speaking of Indiana and another “resilient”: the stainless Harrison Ford, born in 1942 (80 this year!) shot in Sicily, not far from Mozia, the fifth episode of the saga that hopefully will be in theaters in July …
Truly a magical year, during which the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Riace bronzes is also celebrated, spotted by a young Roman chemist with a passion for scuba diving on holiday in Calabria, who at first, given the extraordinary anatomical workmanship of the statues, had even feared he had discovered… a corpse! Instead it was one of the most interesting archaeological finds of the century …
After all, Indiana himself said it in a joke about the “Crystal Skull”: “If you want to be a good archaeologist, you have to get out of this library!” Here, this is Heinrich Schliemann’s teaching, mine Dream man… Shake the dust off your moccasins, get busy. Try and try again: you risk making it. Like him.
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