Tychsen, Vella, Adler and Borgia: The Italian connection in islamic numismatics

The role of Oluf Gerhard Tychsen in Islamic numismatic research cannot be properly evaluated unless we examine the entire net of studies and scholars of the same subject at his time: the main characters of our paper, and indeed of the entire beginning of Islamic numismatics, are Tychsen himself (1734–1815), Cardinal Stefano Borgia (1731–1804), Georg Adler (1756–1834), and, some- how marginal but influential, the forger Giuseppe Vella (1749–1814). The first part of this article, in which a main outline of these relationships is given, is written by Lucia Travaini, while Arianna D’Ottone Rambach investigates some more detailed aspects in the second part.