“UN SILENZIO INESPLICABILE”: TOCCO'S DIGS IN THE HALL OF THE FORMA URBIS (JULY 29–SEPTEMBER 28, 1867)

In this chapter, I provide further information on the excavations carried out in the hall of the Forma Urbis (see Chapters 3.2, 7.4, and 16.4) thanks to my examination of a number of thus far unpublished archival documents concerning Tocco's excavation of 1867, which brought to light ten fragments of the marble plan and started up the modern debate on the ancient buildings incorporated into the Basilica and Monastery of SS. Cosma e Damiano. Nowadays, Efisio Luigi Tocco is an obscure and unknown figure, but in his day, he was a very active archaeologist. Quoting the title of one of his articles, he might be defined as a lover of antiquities. In fact, he was an architect and a mechanical engineer rather than a classicist, but this is not surprising; Rodolfo Lanciani, one of the most important archaeologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an engineer as well. Moreover, in his notes, Tocco recalls that his masters in the study of Roman antiquities had been Antonio Nibby (1792–1839) and Emiliano Sarti (1795–1849). Between 1846 and 1874, Tocco published several articles in newspapers and magazines (L'Osservatore Romano, Il Buonarroti, the Album, the Gazzetta Ufficiale di Roma) and in the main journals (Annali and Bullettino dell'Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica; he was “membro corrispondente” of the Instituto from 1866 to 1873), as well as short monographs dealing with the harbors of Rome, the Naumachia, the floods of the Tiber, the rain and natural waters in primitive Rome (“Studi necessari prima dei grandi scavi nelle parti piane della città”), and the Lake Fucino. He also wrote about sport and bread in antiquity, the liquid found in a sarcophagus in the late fifteenth century, and two statues found in the Campo Verano. Yet his favorite research was on ancient topography and architecture, as attested to by his works on Alsium, Gabii, and Bovillae, and, for what concerns Rome, on the Roman Forum (to which he devoted a long monograph), the velarium of the Colosseum, the Basilica Iulia and, last but not least, the Forma Urbis.