Giovanni Colonna, Professor Emeritus of Etruscan Studies and Archaeology of pre-Roman Italy at the Sapienza Università di Roma and student of Massimo Pallottino, was one of the leading scholars of pre-Roman Italy in the 20th century.
In addition to his research in the domain of Etruscan Studies, he always had a special interest in the innermost regions of the Italian peninsula, starting with his PhD thesis, discussed in 1957, which focused on the study of small votive bronzes in the Italic area. The Thesis, part of which was included in the volume Bronzi votivi umbro-sabellici a figura umana, I. Periodo arcaico (1970), led the scholar to continue his research until 2014, creating what can be defined as the largest and most comprehensive archive on the subject in the world to date.
The archive, consisting of several thousand photographs, related catalogue entries and drawings by the scholar, notebooks and correspondence, is partly deposited at the BSR and partly at the Sapienza.
Thanks to an agreement between Giovanni Colonna, the British School at Rome and the Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Antichità of the Sapienza Università di Roma, a project of studying and digitising the collection for publication was launched; a team of young scholars members of Archaeology of Pre-Roman Italy Teaching Programme at Sapienza is working under the direction of Dr Maria Cristina Biella, in collaboration with Nicolò Sabina.
In 2024 the Project received a Grant under the frame of Project PNRR CHANGES (WP5 “Itineraries of the Sacred along the Aniene Valley”).
