Chapter Fourteen

Margherita Guarducci

Epigraphy is the study of ancient inscriptions. There are few more subtle and difficult subspecialties of archeology. The locations of the ancient inscriptions are often dark, unpleasant, and sometimes even dangerous. Epigraphers are a fountainhead of interesting stories often populated with bandits, snakes, scorpions, and tomb robbers pilfering ancient remains. In addition to the arduous nature of the work, this specialty requires fluency in the dead language involved, and often the ability to understand colloquialisms and rapidly evolving meanings from long-gone worlds. On rare occasions, it requires actually decrypting inscriptions made in long-ago codes. The epigraphist is the Sherlock Holmes of archeology, discovering truth by linking ancient signs one to another, many with meanings that were in use for only a few decades.

Twentieth-century Italy was profoundly sexist. The Italian female stereotype of a mother cooking pasta was, in fact, not an atypical view held in that place and age. Margherita Guarducci profoundly broke the mold. By all descriptions, she could be considered an early Italian feminist, accomplishing amazing archeological breakthroughs in a time and profession dominated by men. She was deeply in love with men — but they were men who had died thousands of years before her birth. She had little use for the men or world of her time. While existing in the present, she lived in the past.

The great archeologists of fiction are invariably sophisticated men of great panache and impressive physical ability and appearance. Indiana Jones of Raiders of the Lost Ark battles natives, snakes, and Nazis with skill and aplomb. Professor Robert Langdon of The Da Vinci Code rushes through a variety of ancient sites adroitly avoiding a variety of deadly conspirators, accompanied by the beautiful Sophie Neveu. It is sometimes said that truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction must be written to seem possible. No writer of fiction could have invented Margherita Guarducci. The brilliant, real-life archeological genius Guarducci, whose discoveries would rival or exceed those of any fictional rivals, was a short, thin, frail-looking woman, whose uninspiring presence concealed an unconquerable spirit, intense energy, and a mind of utter genius. She was truly “a diamond bit” seeking the truth. Before her long life ended, she would perform mental feats, find archeological wonders, and fight battles at least as great as her counterparts in fiction.

She was born in Florence in 1902, to a family of ancient roots. Her long life began shortly after the new century opened. It would end only as the twentieth century closed. It was an amazing journey. Guarducci graduated in 1924 with a degree in archeology from the University of Bologna. She then attended courses and began her life’s work at the National School of Archeology in Rome and the Italian Archaeological School of Athens.143 Almost immediately, she was recognized by her teachers as a rare genius in early Greek epigraphy and became the leading accomplice of Federico Halbherr, a famous archeologist.¹⁴⁴ Guarducci had a fanatical capacity for frenzied work — often under difficult conditions. It was her “firm, but gentle character” that defined Guarducci.145 She was rigidly scientific, and, once convinced of the truth, totally unbending in her beliefs.

She had the active, bright eyes of a bird, accompanied by a constant half-smile. A string of pearls always adorned her neck, and bobby pins maintained her perpetual bun. From the beginning to the end of her long life, she retained the same string and the same half-smile. Guarducci was a great speaker and teacher with an astounding memory, who could recite verbatim many long, ancient Greek and Minoan texts, sometimes unconsciously moving her hands to demonstrate the actual inscriptions she had found. Once launched upon a problem, she would devote years or even decades and tireless energy to the hunt for truth, often under terrible conditions. In an age of male supremacy, and in an Italy famous for sexism and corruption, she conceded nothing on account of position, influence, or male dominance. Her friend, patron, and companion was the truth.

Guarducci’s world was the Greek, Minoan, and Roman world of 3,000 B.C.–A.D. 500. Her constant half-smile reflected the amusement of a time traveler from a long-ago world at the folly of the present world to which she had somehow been transported. One acquaintance compared her, perhaps appropriately, to Savonarola, a Dominican friar burned at the stake in Guarducci’s native Florence in 1498 for speaking unwanted truths. But the same acquaintance also compared Guarducci to Catherine of Siena, a fearless truth-teller, among the greatest of medieval saints.¹⁴⁶ Indeed, traits of both Savonarola and Catherine were present in Guarducci.

It is impossible to understand Guarducci without understanding her Florentine roots. She grew up in the Florence of the Uffizi Gallery with Botticelli, Titian, Giotto, and Leonardo. Even today, much of Florence remains frozen in the Renaissance of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. The city’s great age was fueled by the rediscovery of ancient civilizations. To walk around old Florence is to time travel to the world of the Medici and Donatello, of Michelangelo, and through them even further back to the great classical ages of ancient Greece and Rome. Guarducci’s world consisted of the Renaissance palaces, Ponte Vecchio, Michelangelo’s David, and the Fountain of Neptune in the Piazza della Signoria. She gazed and wondered at Brunelleschi’s great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore and at Giotto’s works. She was not a child of the twentieth century. From childhood, her world was a world of long ago — her loves and dreams were things and people long gone and untainted by the shabby, mercantile twentieth century. She could gaze upon Michelangelo’s David and through it see the Hermes of Praxiteles or even the lost sculptures of Phidias.

It is also impossible to understand Guarducci without understanding the age of archeology when she entered the profession. It was not the dawn of archeology, but it was the morning of that science as a science. Discoverers like Battista Beldoni in Egypt and Heinrich Schliemann of Troy/ Mycenae (modern-day Mykonos) fame had popularized the study, but they were as much adventurers as scientists. Their methods were often crude and unscientific, designed to discover wonderful artifacts as treasure hunters and bring them back to great museums like the Pergamon in Berlin and the British Museum in London. They were much less concerned with systematically studying and preserving sites. Kenneth Harl wrote cruelly, but accurately, of the great Schliemann that he had done to the Trojans what the Greeks could not do: destroy their entire city.147 In the 1920s, science began to replace the treasure hunt for artifacts. Archeologists started using a grid system, accurately surveying and carefully studying, strata by strata, to establish chronological order and gain all the information actually available from an ancient site. Epigraphy, photography, forensic evidence, and, much later, carbon dating and various tools of remote survey became implements of a much more scientific and thorough archeology. Guarducci was deeply committed to the use of these scientific methods and tools to arrive at the truth. Like other well-trained archeologists of the period, she was horrified at the destructive treasure hunts of earlier archeological investigations. She viewed herself as a scientist committed to finding scientific truth.

Guarducci’s Early Career

She made her name in Cretan excavations and epigraphy. The city of Gortyna in Crete is one of the oldest continuously occupied cities in the world, dating back some six thousand years to the late neolithic period. In 1884, Federico Halbherr with others found more than ten meters of a circular stone wall inscribed by sculptors between 525 and 450 B.C. with what came to be known as the “queen of inscriptions,” or the Gortyna Code. For nearly forty years, the massive inscription — clearly a legal code from the city just prior to the Golden Age of Greece — remained largely unintelligible to the world. Halbherr’s career, while epic, was much more Indiana Jones than careful study, and he had heard of Guarducci’s genius — she was already widely known to be a rare talent in epigraphy. Halbherr associated Guarducci in his work and became her mentor by 1929. For many years, and after Halbherr’s death, Guarducci worked on decrypting the massive legal code. She succeeded, and “the great inscription,” as it came to be known, provided the fullest available picture of how the Greeks actually regulated their lives on the edge of the Golden Age. The inscription covered subjects such as adultery (a small fine), rape (a big fine), divorce, inheritance rights, crime, arrests, and suits. Changes made over the seventy-five-year period of the code reflected it being amended to increase the rights of slaves and decrease the rights of women. Guarducci then proceeded to systematically record and translate into Latin (in those days the official language of archeology) thousands of Cretan inscriptions covering many hundreds of years. Over a twenty-year period, she published these in a multivolume series called Inscriptiones Creticae, in her name and the name of her beloved, deceased mentor. Guarducci’s work was not simply famous; it was foundational. Her genius, combined with more than twenty years of tedious study, provided the most complete view of the actual life of a Greek city-state on the very cusp of the Golden Age. In addition, she opened inscriptions dating back to legendary Minoan days, bringing them to the modern world for the first time. She was universally hailed as one of archeology’s great geniuses.

Against all odds in an age and profession still dominated by men, Guarducci became, through sheer genius, a famous archeologist, a much-published author, and a professor of epigraphy at the University of Rome, one of the largest and oldest universities in the world.148 She was notorious for lack of tact or political skill. Abrupt and lacking relationship to modern people or institutions, Guarducci accomplished everything through raw brilliance. Paraphrasing the famous Italian antiquarian Federico Zeri, she had no clients or ideology other than the truth.

Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, “Genius hits a target no one else can see.” For this reason, genius is both a blessing and a curse. It excites at least as much resentment and envy as appreciation. Thus Vincent Van Gogh, regarded as a bizarre failure, did not sell a single painting during his lifetime. Nikola Tesla died broke and alone in a hotel room, regarded by many as a fraud. Resentment and envy seem to build to particularly great heights when the genius is a woman surrounded by men of inferior talent. If the legends are true, this goes back to ancient times and Cassandra, whose genius was seeing the future, ignored by everyone when she famously warned her fellow Trojans to beware Greeks bearing gifts. Or consider Saint Joan of Arc, the greatest female military leader of all time, burned as a witch by men who could not conceive that a mere woman could possess such genius and, therefore, believed the devil must be aiding her. Guarducci’s genius unveiled would in short order prove both a gift and a curse, exciting some of the same sort of envy and disbelief as Cassandra and Joan of Arc faced.

Guarducci in the Necropolis

In April 1952, Ludwig Kaas died. In a mark of affection and respect, Pius caused Kaas to be buried in the Necropolis close to the location where they believed Peter had been found. The excavation team had lost its leader, although Ferrua and the other excavators had kept him practically shut out of the day-to-day proceedings in the work.

By May 1952, the presumed bones of Peter continued to rest in the pope’s apartments, where they had remained for a decade. Ferrua and the excavators had reported to Pius XII that, other than the presumed bones and the later altars erected by Constantine and others, few references to Peter could be located. They found numerous inscriptions, but they considered these unintelligible and meaningless graffiti. The Ferrua team was celebrated in a Time magazine cover story in March 1950 as archeological geniuses and pioneers.

In that year, the world of the Ferrua team would begin to turn upside down. Montini, a friend of Guarducci’s ancient Florentine family, extended an invitation to her to be one of the first non-Vatican employees to tour the excavation. It is probable that Montini and Strake discussed the necessity of bringing in outside experts at substantial cost during Montini’s Glen Eyrie visit. Like Ludwig Kaas, Montini was uncomfortable with the work of the Ferrua team. He personally invited Guarducci to study the Necropolis, likely envisioning she would be there for a week or so. That week became decades.

Guarducci entered the Necropolis and was immediately horrified by the team’s evident failure to follow basic archeological procedures.149 It was apparent that this was one of the world’s greatest archeological sites, and it had been badly mistreated. Many inscriptions, some painted, had been uncovered and then left without protection in the moist, destructive underworld for a decade. History was literally vanishing. Astonishingly, no systematic photographic record had been made. When Guarducci saw the Graffiti Wall, it was apparent to her trained eye that the peculiar scratches were not meaningless, as Ferrua reported, but rather had very special meanings.¹⁵⁰ Finally, in a tomb thirty feet from the center of the altar constructed by Constantine, she found an overlooked inscription meaning “Christian men buried near your body.”¹⁵¹ She made a full report to Montini and Pius. Following this report, and in the wake of Ludwig Kaas’s death, Pius made the surprising decision to replace Kaas not with Ferrua, but with Margherita Guarducci. In 1953, Guarducci was made head of the excavations. Kirschbaum and Ferrua were abruptly excluded from further leadership in the Necropolis (although they retained administrative positions at the Vatican).152

Given Guarducci’s typical lack of tact, it is hardly surprising that Ferrua was furious. He viewed Guarducci as an incompetent interloper preying on the glory of his work. Under the best circumstances, a laywoman superseding and criticizing a priest would not be calculated to build close friendship. Guarducci’s abruptness inspired deep, long-lasting resentment in Ferrua.

Things got worse when Guarducci noticed a photograph of an inscription on a wall in a 1951 article by Ferrua. When she searched for the inscription at its site, it was no longer in the Necropolis. She learned that Ferrua had removed it to his home, ostensibly to study it.¹⁵³ A direct order from Pius XII secured its return.¹⁵⁴ This critical inscription — without which the mystery would perhaps have remained unsolved — read, “Peter is here.”¹⁵⁵ It was originally located on the Graffiti Wall a few feet from the Trophy of Gaius at the center of the Vatican.

Ferrua no doubt regarded the conflict over this critical, removed inscription as an attack, not only on his competence, but on his honor. In his view, Guarducci was an incompetent poacher — a pilot fish who had come to steal credit for his work by telling Pius and Montini whatever they wanted to hear. Over time, the interaction between the two deteriorated, with a bitterly resentful Ferrua targeting Guarducci’s work. Indeed, he seems to have developed an insatiable hatred for Guarducci. Ferrua would denounce her work as “fundamentally wrong” and use a combination of invective and humor to make fun of her.¹⁵⁶ In contrast, Guarducci seems largely to have ignored Ferrua. This adversarial relationship would launch one of the greatest and bitterest controversies in archeological history.¹⁵⁷

While Ferrua retained various executive positions as a Vatican antiquities functionary, he was barred from further leadership in the excavation for the remainder of Pius XII’s life. Ferrua would, nevertheless, slowly climb to the top of the Vatican antiquities structure.

Shortly after taking charge of the excavation, Guarducci noticed a hole in the bottom of the Graffiti Wall very close to the Trophy of Gaius. When she examined it, she found that it was an ancient, marble-lined wall niche. She asked a workman, Giovanni Segoni, whether any artifact or relic had been found there. Segoni said that, in fact, bones had been discovered in the cavity eleven years earlier in 1942.158 Kaas, horrified by Ferrua’s disrespect for remains, had asked Segoni to remove the bones from the marble niche, place them in a wooden box, and label and place the box in a storeroom where they had lain for more than a decade, totally forgotten.¹⁵⁹ Like the fictional storage of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Guarducci had stumbled upon the solution to the mystery of Peter, but it would be many years before she or anyone else realized it. These bones seemed irrelevant given Ferrua’s discovery of the assumed bones of Peter under the Trophy of Gaius. So Guarducci stored the Graffiti Wall bones again in the storeroom, resolving to have them forensically examined. Meanwhile, the presumed bones of Peter remained in the papal apartment.

Guarducci’s first task in light of the decade-old deterioration of the uncovered epigraphs was to photograph everything. Strake continued to finance her extensive activity. She approached the task of learning the truth with fanatical devotion — spending every morning in the grey necropolis examining the inscriptions, and poring over piles of photographs every evening. Other than her teaching at the university, work surrounding the secret excavation beneath the Vatican became her entire life.

The Graffiti Wall inscriptions were a “forest” of scratches, interlineated one on top of another or densely packed. Her first job was to separate the individual “trees” from the forest — that is, to separate for individual examination the inscriptions one by one as they were actually made. Using photography, magnification, and physical inspection over many months, she tenaciously did exactly that, separating individual inscriptions into those made at one time with one pair of hands so long ago. She then proceeded to decode the hundreds of inscriptions she found. It was a task akin to separating a massive pile of pickup sticks without destroying any of them.

The Necropolis had originally been sealed by the construction of the first St. Peter’s Basilica in 337, so it was apparent that all inscriptions must predate that. Her first great find was the faded inscription, “In Hoc Vince” — translated, “In This Conquer.”160 This inscription must have been carved less than eighteen years after Constantine’s victory. It confirmed to Guarducci the story that Constantine and his troops claimed to have seen these words written in the sky with a cross the day before their epic victory at the Milvian Bridge. This fantastic account had come to be widely regarded as a myth invented much later. Yet Guarducci’s discovery provided incontrovertible confirmation that this story had begun to circulate while the witnesses were still alive — it was not a later fabrication.