Vatican Museums

A new volume contributes to enriching the revised series of the Cataloghi delle Collezioni dei Musei Vaticani, offering a study of a “minor” collection housed in the early Twentieth century within the Antiquarium Romanum of the Gregorian Etruscan Museum.

The catalogue focusses on a corpus of over 500 stamped fragments of Italian terra sigillata, which had long remained unpublished, and whose peculiar collecting history has been reconstructed through meticulous archival research. Initiated in 2018, the research completed by the author has yielded significant new insights, both from an archaeological perspective – concerning the discovery of unpublished stamps and the identification of potential new production workshops – and regarding the history of collecting, by bringing to light the figure of the donor, a Chilean diplomat stationed in Rome at the beginning of the last century who collected antiquities as a connoisseur and passionate collector. The volume is structured into three sections (study of the collection, catalogue, and conclusions), followed by an exhaustive bibliography and extensive plates illustrating the individual fragments that constitute the “Rodríguez collection”.