Magica Etruria

At the end of the 1960s Mario Bizzarri and his friend Claudio

Curri collaborated on a book they called Magica Etruria.

The title by itself hints at the personal approach adopted by a

man, an archaeologist, as he explored dimensions and sensations

that were foreign to the field of scientific research. For the archaeologist

Mario Bizzarri it was a chance to give free rein to his

imagination as he offered the reader a personal tour rather than a

guidebook, one that even today, so many years later, opens the

door on the intriguing world of archaeology and Etruscology.

In the preamble to Magica Etruria the reader is immediately

told that: “This book is not a treatise on Etruscology... Nor is it a

detailed handbook on Etruscan antiquities... Lastly this book is

not a complete itinerary of the places in Etruria, to be used by a

reader as a vade mecum in touring the region.

What then is this book? It is simply a sort of capricious wandering

through the dead and living cities of Etruria, calling forth

from the one and the other a confirmation of the permanent

validity of an intimate dialogue between the human spirit and

what remains of that antique world.” The chapters written by

Mario Bizzarri reflect his “intimate dialogue” with the sites he

was most familiar with and which he saw in a way that makes his

writing akin to that of George Dennis and D.H.Lawrence.

In 1950 he admitted in a letter to a friend that his vision of

archaeology was still romantic. “What fascinates me most is an

open dig with the ruins ‘in situ’. It is the ‘living museums’ that I

like, not those orderly cemeteries of which we are the diligent

gravediggers. The ‘captured’ object put behind glass gives me a

deep feeling of melancholy and a vague sense of guilt.”