The inauguration of the exhibition "The Assyrians in the Shadow of Vesuvius" at the National Archaeological Museum is scheduled for today, Wednesday, July 3. The exhibition will run until September 16 and is organized in collaboration with the University of Naples "L'Orientale" and ISMEO—International Association of Mediterranean and Oriental Studies.
English: The idea for the exhibition, developed by Professor Simonetta Graziani who worked on its organization with a group of students and colleagues from the Orientale, was born from an original and rather forgotten heritage of the Museum. These are thirteen plaster casts of neo-Assyrian reliefs from Nineveh and Nimrud, the originals of which belong to the collections of the British Museum in London and are exhibited in the so-called Assyrian Basement. The circumstances in which they arrived in Naples and in particular at the Archaeological Museum are described in the catalogue, as is the cultural climate in which the excavator of Nineveh, Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894), could underline his esteem for the then director of the Museum and excavator of Pompeii Giuseppe Fiorelli (1823-1896) is witnessed by the mutual exchanges of gifts, many of which were finds from their respective excavations, according to a scientific ethic that is naturally difficult to share today. The exhibition “The Assyrians in the shadow of Vesuvius” will therefore have the aim not only of recounting the characteristics of a great civilization of the past, but also of highlighting the remarkable size of the cultural laboratory offered by Naples in the first decades of unification, and lastly, last but not least, of drawing attention to the existence in Naples and the Oriental area of an ancient and consolidated Assyriological tradition that reached, during the active teaching of its founder, Professor Luigi Cagni, the dimensions of the largest Italian center – and one of the largest in Europe – of these studies.
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