Giulierini: “Precious exhibition”.
The exhibition “Byzantine places, symbols and communities of a thousand-year-old empire” at the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, which has attracted fifty thousand visitors in less than two months, has been extended until April 10.
“We are delighted to be able to extend such a precious exhibition until the Easter holidays, with a focus on Naples as a Byzantine city for about six centuries, and exploring the links between Greece and southern Italy. I thank the foreign lenders for this.”
The exhibition develops in fifteen sections the historical phases following the Western Roman Empire, among the Neapolitan testimonies also a coin dedicated to San Gennaro. Opened last December and scheduled to end on February 13, the exhibition is curated by Federico Marazzi with the coordination for the MANN by Laura Forte and offers over four hundred objects from the MANN collections and from loans granted by 57 of the main museums and institutions that preserve Byzantine materials in Italy and Greece (33 Italian institutes, 22 Greek museums including the islands, the Vatican Museums and the Fabbrica di San Pietro).
Thanks to the collaboration with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, many of the exhibited materials are visible for the first time: several artefacts were discovered during excavations for the construction of the Thessaloniki Metro.
Other finds, on loan from the Superintendence of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape for the Municipality of Naples, were found in the excavations of the subway line 1. In the exhibition, sculptures, mosaics, frescoes, instrumentum domesticum, seals, coins, ceramics, enamels, silver furnishings, goldsmith's work and architectural elements give an account of a complex reality, characterized by manufacturing and artistic excellence.
Thanks to the symbols of the Eastern Empire, the creativity of the ancient world thus “transits” towards the Middle Ages, with a language renewed by the Christian faith and enriched by Iranian and Arab cultural grafts.
Article published on 11 February 2023 - 11:00
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