L’Università degli Studi di Milano e la Collezione Lerici alle Civiche Raccolte: stato dell’arte e prospettive

The Civic Archaeological Museum of Milano hosts more than 150 Etruscan tomb-groups from the Cerveteri necropolises, which has been gifted to the museum in 1975 by Carlo Maurilio Lerici. This important heritage of more than 3500 items between the 8th and the 3rd centuries BC, has been subject of study and research by the Chair of Etruscology of the University of Milan since the 1980s. This collaborative project with the museum's management, started by Maria Bonghi Jovino and Ermanno Arslan at the beginning of the Eighties of last century. Publications between 1980 and 2004, two exhibitions organized in 1980 and in 1986 besides several scientific dissertations, has concerned more or less a third of the whole collection but after 2004, due to the museum’s spaces refurbishment, direct accessibility to the material was no longer allowed. A systematic filing of the collection within the SIRBeC portal however has been carried out in that context by the Museum itself and by Regione Lombardia and it includes at date approximately 90 tombs. The current inaccessibility to archaeological material and the difficulty in distinguishing individual burials among single tomb-groups compel to consider new perspectives. This work is aimed at outlining the history of such research, at proposing approaches regarding materials and publishing strategies (G. Bagnasco Gianni) and at giving an overview of the currently data made available by the University of Milan to access this extraordinary heritage (C. Ridi). The research perspectives proposed concern in particular the archaeometric non-invasive investigation in order to distinguish among local productions, and further the analysis of the tomb-groups, filed so far from the standpoint of defining semantic spheres of reference, based on a sample study published in 2002 (Cerveteri 2002).