Dall’Italia agli Stati Uniti. Appunti vulcenti

The work presents a new analysis of the tomb-groups excavated by Francesco Mancinelli Scotti at Vulci between 1894 and 1895, currently preserved in museums in the United States of America. The restudy of these assemblages of artifacts revealed how they all appear to have been altered and therefore are unreliable. These tomb-groups arrived in 1896 in the collections of the Museums of Philadelphia and Chicago, by means of Arthur L. Frothingham, and were published respectively by Edith Hall Dohan (1942) and Richard D. De Puma (1986). Most of the discrepancies of those tomb-groups from Vulci, that are displayed in the United States, can be related to the actions of Francesco Mancinelli Scotti and his partner Giuseppe Ficola, who were always ready to sell at a high price the results of their “excavation company”, skillfully manipulating the original contexts if necessary