SAN CASCIANO DEI BAGNI, Italy – An extraordinary series of near-perfectly preserved bronze statues have been unearthed at a natural thermal spa in Italy.
Twenty-four statues were discovered in the Tuscan village of San Casciano dei Bagni which lies halfway between Rome and Florences. The region is known for a series of natural thermal pools and San Casciano dei Bagni boasts a 2,000-year-old spa, Balnea Clusinae that legend says was founded by Porsenna, an Etruscan king. Romans continued to use the baths in Antiquity and the town attracted visitors from throughout Europe from the Renaissance through the early 20th Century.
Credit: Ministero della Cultura
The thermal hot springs of San Casciano dei Bagni are located just outside the town and are called “vasconi” or tubs. The Romans then developed the natural springs to form the baths.
Archeologists were originally surveying the area to explore the foundations of the original Great Bath Sanctuary. To their amazement, they found hands protruding from the mud. In the past two weeks, 24 statues have been uncovered including one of Hygieia, the goddess of health. A statute of Apollo was also found as well as other divinities, emperors and matrons.
Credit: Ministero della Cultura
Almost overnight, San Casciano dei Bagni is now home to the largest deposit of ancient bronze statues of the Etruscan and Roman age ever discovered in Italy and one of the most significant of the whole Mediterranean. The statues are unmatched because similar finds from this era have been mainly terracotta.
The Great Bath sanctuary of San Casciano dei Bagni Credit: Ministero della Cultura
“It is a discovery that will rewrite history and on which over 60 experts from all over the world are already at work,” said Prof. Jacopo Tabolli, the Etruscologist in charge of the excavation. He said that 50 years after the discovery in 1972 of the now-famous “Riace Bronzes,” the history of the ancient bronze statuary of the Etruscan and Roman age will be rewritten by the find at San Casciano dei Bagni.
The Riace Bronzes also referred to as the Riace Warriors, are two full-size Greek bronzes of bearded warriors that were found off the coast of Calabria, Italy in 1972. The Riace bronzes, which survived two millennia underwater, re-wrote art history by exposing the exceptional technical skill of ancient artists and metallurgists. The Riace Bronzes are now in the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia and are so unique that they are in a specialized microclimate room on an anti-seismic platform.
The San Casciano dei Bagni bronzes will rival the Riace Bronzes according to experts.
The significance of the find brought swift attention from Italy’s Ministry of Culture. The Director General of Museums, Massimo Osanna, said: “It is the most important discovery since the Riace Bronzes and certainly one of the most significant bronzes ever found in the history of the ancient Mediterranean.”
Orsanna then announced the approved purchase of a sixteenth-century building in the village of San Casciano that will be converted into a museum that will house the new find. He added that it will be the first step in creating a new archeological park.
The statues were covered by almost 6,000 bronze, silver, and gold coins, and San Casciano’s hot muddy waters helped to preserve them “almost like as on the day they were immersed,” Tabolli said. The statues were likely constructed between the 2nd Century BCE and the 1st Century CE. They were likely immersed in the waters of the Great Bath around the 1st Century CE.
Despite two millennia of burial, the statues are “almost like as on the day they were immersed,” Tabolli said.
The Ministry said that the time period of the statues was one of “great transformation in ancient Tuscany,” and that the Great Bath represented a “unique multicultural and multilingual haven of peace, surrounded by political instability and war.”
“What emerged from the mud in San Casciano dei Bagni is a unique opportunity to rewrite the history of ‘ancient art and with it the history of the passage between Etruscans and Romans in Tuscany,” added Tabolli.
The remarkable detail of the 24 statues and the several small statues that have now been recovered suggest that they came from an elite settlement because the archaeological team also found “wonderful inscriptions in Etruscan and Latin,” mentioning the names of powerful local families.
Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano took the opportunity to that this “exceptional discovery … confirms once again that Italy is a country of immense and unique treasures.”
For now, the statues have been taken to a restoration laboratory in the nearby city of Grosseto.
But the bronzes will return to San Casciano’s new museum.
The Ministry added that the bronzes of San Casciano depict the deities venerated in the sacred place and that healing waters represented the curative intervention of divine powers. The coins found with the statue and various artifacts with inscriptions in Etruscan and Latin are votive deposits. The votives, of course, were part of religious rites and Osanna noted that they were never meant to be found.
During the Christian era, the sanctuary was closed but not destroyed, the tanks were sealed, and the divinities were submerged underwater. The votives and statues were given to the sacred waters.
“You give to the water because you hope that the water gives something back to you,” Tabolli said. Indeed, the water seems to have done so.
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