It will reopen to the public soon on Temple of Alatri, inside the Garden of the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia a Roma. Located between the Nymphaeum and the right wing of the exhibition, it will become the Machine of the Temple, an immersive digital space where visitors can experience a storytelling that will unfold on a journey through time. The role of its digital component will be important, but just as important will be that of the story and its narration. Work on the Temple Machine could be ready by 2023.
It will become the Machine of the Temple, an original journey through history and time
A visionary idea and the realization of this temple, one of the most important monuments of Villa Giulia, is far ahead in time. It is in fact the life-size reproduction of an Etruscan-Italic temple that had been found in Alatri, in the province of Frosinone, in the 1882. At the time, the architect and archaeologist Adolfo Cozza took care of the reconstruction. He was commissioned, strongly convinced of the goodness of this idea, by the founding father of the Etruscan Museum, Felice Bernabei.
The model on which to make this copy, on a one-to-one scale, was a small temple dating back to the III-II century BC. It had been brought to light thanks to an excavation by Adolfo Cozza himself and Hermann Winnefeld of the Germanic Archaeological Institute, in La Stazza, one kilometer north of Alatri. In order for the reconstruction to be faithful to the original, the information that came directly from the archaeological excavations was treasured. To give the public the opportunity to understand how a Tuscan temple was made.
At the end of the nineteenth century the Temple of Alatri was one of the first examples of "open air museum"
For the construction of this copy of the temple - the works began in 1889, the year the Etruscan Museum was opened, and continued until 1891 - an attempt was made to reproduce the same techniques of over two thousand years earlier. With particular attention to the original materials, wood, ceramics, terracotta, and also to their particular decorations. The operation was successful. The temple of Alatri represented one of the first examples in the world of reconstruction for educational and innovative purposes. A very futuristic work, for the time, one of the first cases of “open air museum” on an international level. Despite this, the work had been little appreciated and unfairly underestimated by museological critics. Perhaps because the idea was too innovative. But also because in a short time the temple had been abandoned to a situation of progressive decay. To become, in the end, a deposit not accessible to the public.
The new intervention 45 years after the last restoration
45 years after the last renovation that had been coordinated by a nephew of Adolfo Cozza, the archaeologist Lucos Cozza, we start again with this important restoration. It will give the temple a new life in the way that is most consistent with the ancient spirit, respecting the techniques and materials of the time. Just as it had been at the end of the nineteenth century, while ensuring the maximum safety that current knowledge can guarantee.
A restoration, the current one, which is only the first step of a wider path. The financing of the work comes from the Lazio region which has made an ad hoc call for technological innovation and digital communication. In addition to the restoration, there will be the Temple Machine. He will reconstruct the landscape of Alatri of the time, to tell the best possible way, thanks to new technologies, that environment at that time. The Temple of Alatri can therefore be reviewed, reread and reinterpreted by visitors. The Machine of the Temple will take them on a journey through time and space of great emotion.
(credit photo in evidence: Saliko - CC BY-SA 4.0)
