Michel Tyszkiewicz (1828-1897) et les fouilles archéologiques en Italie

Abstract

According to Stanisław Lorentz, the collections of Michel Tyszkiewicz, enriched by his excavations in Egypt and Italy, undoubtedly “belonged to the more valuable European collections created in the second half of the 19th century”. After his first journey to Egypt, Tyszkiewicz, enlivened with a passion for excavations, first lived in Naples and then settled permanently in Rome in 1865. As the political situation changed there after 1870 and the new government restrained issuing permits, he started applying for excavation permits in his estate of Birże, in Lithuania (1871). Later, in 1894, he also tried to obtain excavation permits at Olbia, in Southern Russia, but this time unsuccessfully. His unpublished letters to the famous German scholar Wilhelm Froehner (1834–1925), now in the Goethe und Schiller Archiv in Weimar, throw a new light on the discoveries that took place in Boscoreale and in Lake Nemi and on his purchases there, as well as on his great enterprise in relation to the Satricum excavations in 1896, from which he was excluded after discovering the trace of “thousands of different votive objects”.