Agrigento dal Tardo Antico al Medioevo. Campagne di scavo nell'area della necropoli paleocristiana. Anni 1986-1999 (review)

One thinks of Agrigento, near Sicily's southern shore, above all for its glorious Greek past. This "fairest of mortal cities", as Pindar called it,¹ is of course famous for the outstanding remains of archaic and classical Akragas; yet anyone who has wandered along the so-called Valley of the Temples will have noticed numerous funerary arcosolia with their distinctive semicircular openings carved in the rock, redolent of a later age. These burials of late Roman and early Byzantine Agrigentum, which include sub divo (open-air) necropolises, hypogea and small catacombs, are important witnesses of early Christianity in the island. Their significance was first recognized a century ago by Führer and Schulze,² and the remains were studied in great detail by Mercurelli in a classic paper now 60 years old;³ but in more recent years the torch has passed to Professor Rosa Maria Bonacasa Carra of the University of Palermo, who has conducted further research into Agrigento's paleochristian cemeteries with great distinction. The book under review makes a further important contribution to our knowledge of early Christian Agrigentum.

Bonacasa Carra began excavating an adjacent sector of this paleochristian necropolis, immediately west of the Temple of Concord, in 1985, and the excavations conducted between then and 1988 were the subject of a substantial book expensively published by L'Erma di Bretschneider in 1995.⁴ One might have expected the volume under review, which describes further excavations in a separate sector of the same necropolis between 1986 and 1999, to have been published in the same series, but instead we have a change of publisher, a switch to a smaller format,⁵ the inclusion of 17 pages of colour plates, and a book issued in hardback instead of paperback. The result is a particularly handsomely produced volume, printed on coated art paper and weighing in at a hefty 1.75 kg. It is also welcome that the price, despite inflation in the intervening years, has gone down, although at €190 it will be beyond the pocket of most private individuals and beyond the reach even of many university libraries in these cash-strapped times.

That is a pity, because there is much of value in the volume. The first part of the book (3-59) describes the excavations themselves, divided into six sections and written by five different authors, each covering a different but adjacent area of the necropolis. One can understand why this was done, so that each site supervisor could describe and publish their own work in their own words, but it does lead to a somewhat disjointed overall presentation of the material, with each author describing in turn all of the different periods recorded within his or her section. A unified account divided by period would have been more helpful to the reader. Six phases were identified in all, from the late Roman to the modern. Only the first two concern the paleochristian necropolis; of the others the most significant were Periods 4 and 5, belonging to the 11^th and 12^th centuries AD, which embrace the construction, use and destruction of two large pottery kilns.⁶ The latter are of great importance for the study of medieval archaeology in central southern Sicily.

There follow two sections of synthesis by the first-named editor (61-68), summarizing the significance of the excavations, first for our knowledge of the early Christian necropolis, and then for that of the medieval period. The necropolis, which dates to the fourth and fifth centuries AD, is now known to extend at least 175 m east of the "Tempio di Ercole". In this particular sector it was arranged on either side of a cemetery road 5.50 m wide. Many of the graves were sub divo, but family tombs (hypogea), partly rock-cut, were also present...