Dr Lorenzo Calvelli, “A View from Athens. Reassessing Cyriac of Ancona’s Vita and Commentaria”

Abstract: This lecture will explore the manuscript tradition and the discoveries of Cyriac of Ancona, the fifteenth-century Italian humanist, merchant and traveller who is often regarded as the earliest pioneer of modern epigraphy and archaeology. It will first trace the history of Cyriac’s Commentaria de rebus antiquis — a vast corpus of travel journals once comprising several volumes, now almost entirely lost but echoed in later manuscript sources. Through these documents, it will be possible to understand how Cyriac’s observations on ancient monuments and inscriptions circulated among humanists and shaped the study of classical antiquity for centuries. The second part will reconstruct Cyriac’s first visit to Athens in April 1436, when he recorded dozens of inscriptions and monuments — from the Parthenon and the Tower of the Winds to the choragic monuments of Lysicrates and Thrasyllos — capturing the appearance of a city that has since been transformed. The talk will conclude by taking the audience on a journey through fifteenth-century Athens, rediscovering the city through the eyes of its first modern witness.

Bio: Lorenzo Calvelli is an Associate Professor of Ancient History at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where he leads the Laboratory of Latin Epigraphy and coordinates the Research Institute for Digital Cultural Heritage. A specialist in the writing cultures of the ancient world, his research focuses on the manuscript transmission of inscriptions and on their reuse as spolia, both material and conceptual, including the production of forgeries. He has explored the classical past of Venice and Cyprus by examining the Roman conquest of the island and the reappropriation of its antiquities in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. On these topics, he has published two books: Cipro e la memoria dell’antico (2009) and Il tesoro di Cipro (2020). A former research fellow of the universities of Harvard (Villa I Tatti), Princeton and Oxford, he has taught in Heidelberg, London, Paris, Poitiers, Rome, Sydney and Warwick. Co-founder and co-editor of the diamond open-access journal History of Classical Scholarship, he is committed to promoting the values of the classics and of the humanities in today’s global world from both an interdisciplinary and a decolonising perspective. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and a member of the International Association of Greek and Latin Epigraphy.