Abstract
o October 15, 2008 a great scholar and a real gentleman passed away: Domenico Faccenna, to whom the scientific community owes broad and fundamental contributions, among which the first consistent and extensive archaeological approach to the vexata quaestio of the origin and development of Gandharan art. Those like me who had the chance to work with him and share with him the harshness and zest of field work in a faraway country owe even more to Domenico Faccenna, not only in terms of professional development but also in terms of human experience. It is difficult to me to separate the scholar from the generous mentor, the severe boss, the paternal friend. I shall not even try to do it. When the editors of this periodical asked me for some pages to dedicate to him, I gratefully agreed, pushed more by my personal feelings than by a clear intention or real capability. I apologise in advance to the readers for presenting here a portrait of Domenico Faccenna submerged in the emotional flow of memories, memories that are intertwined by now with half of my life, but I am confident that, in due time, more precise and systematic biographies will pay him a more objective and comprehensive tribute. Domenico Faccenna was a young and brilliant classical archaeologist when, in the mid-1950s, he met Giuseppe Tucci, the founder and then president of the Istituto Italiano per il medio ed Estremo oriente (IsmEo; now Istituto per l’Africa e l’oriente, IsIAo, after its merger with the Istituto Italo-Africano in 1995), who in 1956 entrusted Faccenna with the direction of the Italian Archaeological mission in Pakistan. The aim, based on a scholarly project inspired and initiated by Tucci himself, was the reconstruction of the cultural history of Swat, the prosperous region lying between the foot of the mountain range connecting the Hindukush with the Karakoram and the Peshawar plain, the Uḍḍiyāṇa (lit. “garden”) of ancient Sanskrit sources. And indeed this “garden”, lying as it does
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