Guerra, archeologia e memoria. Le Navi di Nemi

Engramma issue 203 “Guerra archeologia e architettura. Le Navi di Nemi”, focuses on the Roman ships exctracted from the Lake Nemi and placed in a dedicated museum, in the historical context of fascist propaganda. The ships where destroyed during the Allied campain inItaly in 1944. The introductive papers by Monica Centanni, Daniela De Angelis, and Elisabetta Pallottino Il Centro di Documentazione di Nemi. Un luogo, e un sito, per la ricerca sulle Navi, il Lago, il Museo, and Il Museo delle Navi romane di Nemi. Passato presente e futuro, underline the necessity to reactivate and coordinate research over the Museum and surroundings, in a multidisciplinary approach, and propose the creation of a dedicated Research Centre. Giacomo Calandra di Roccolino addresses the history of the architecture of the Museum in Architettura e propaganda. Il Museo delle Navi di Nemi, spunti per una ricerca, a masterpiece by architect Vittorio Ballio Morpurgo. The relationship between the project of the Museum and the surrounding landscape, that inspired the seminal The Golden bough, by James Frazer (1915), is the topic of the article written by Agostina Incutti, Elisabetta Pallottino, Paola Porretta Paesaggio sacro, pittura di paesaggio, paesaggio costruito Ricerche in corso sul paesaggio nemorense e il Museo delle Navi romane. Flavio Altamura e Stefano Paolucci reconstruct historically the dramatic events that caused the fire that destroyed the ships in 1944 (Una lente sull’incendio delle navi romane di Nemi), rejecting the commonly accepted fault of the German troops and providing evidence that the fire could have been caused by accident by the American artillery. The importance of a cross and multidisciplinary reading of the testimonies on the Ships and the Nemi Museum is underlighted by the contributions of Filippo Perfetti on the film Lo specchio di Diana by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi (1996), with a re-edition of the interview with the filmmakers by Bruno Fornara, and by the contribution by Ilaria Grippa and Christian Toson “Le navi romane si possono vedere anche in tre” on the sequence set at Nemi in the film L'assassino by Elio Petri (1961). Giovanni Pietrangeli e Paola Redemagni provide a detailed description of the archival documents regarding the excavations of the ships and the company Riva Calzoni led by Guido Ucelli, preserved in the Museum of Science and Technology in Milan (Dallo scavo all’archivio. Le carte sulle Navi di Nemi negli archivi del Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia). An updated bibliography curated by Agostina Incutti and Christian Toson (Bibliografia aggiornata sulle navi di Nemi, il Museo delle navi romane e il territorio nemorense) ends the first section about the Nemi ships. The second section comprises an overview of the researches in Engramma about War, Architecture, Archaeology and Memory (numeri monografici e contributi su Guerra e Memoria pubblicati in Engramma), a contribution by Ludovico Rebaudo reconstructing the topography of an ancient Roman site discovered during World War I near Gorgo island in Grado (Anfore romane fra gli idrovolanti. Archeologia di guerra sull’isola Gorgo (luglio-agosto 1917)), and ends with L’architettura di Auschwitz, an essay by Guido Morpurgo that, by describing the architecture of the Auschwitz II – Birkenau extermination camp, reflects on the reponsibilty of the designer.