Aldo Cazzullo (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
AND2005 when Serena Raffiotta began working on the filing of the archaeological museum of Aidone, cataloging the finds from the sacred area of Morgantina, Sicily, and was struck by the fragment of a curl of terracotta, colored blue.
It came from a sanctuary, that of the San Francesco Bisconti district, little known to scholars but very popular with grave robbers.
Perhaps the Venus of Morgantina also came from here, smuggled and repatriated from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
No one imagined that this happy ending story wasn’t over yet. It so happened that the publication edited by Serena ended up in the right hands: an archaeologist, now an official of the Regional Department of Cultural Heritage, who in the past had spent a period of study at the Getty, and had examined all the terracotta finds from Sicily and Magna Graecia there.
Among them was a male head of a divinity with a thick beard with blue curls: a masterpiece of Hellenistic Greek art. Leafing through Serena’s book, the archaeologist couldn’t help but notice that curl, whose color reminded her of Getty’s head..
Meanwhile, the head continued to make a fine show of itself at the museum in Malibu as well as on the museum’s website, where thanks to a photographic enlargement Serena was already able to ascertain that an obvious gap in the blue beard seemed to be compatible with the curl at the Sicilian museum of Aidone.
Then, on January 10, 2013, Raffiotta read on Los Angeles Times the news of the voluntary return to Sicily of a terracotta head of the god Hades, dated between 400 and 300 BC. And she recognized the head: it was the one the archaeologist had told her about.
The precious find had been linked to Morgantina precisely by the blue curl, to which three others had been added, casually “rediscovered” on the occasion of the recent reorganization of a museum warehouse. The tiring cataloging work done back in 2005 had paid off, demonstrating how research is never a waste of time.
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