Among the many excavations in which I took part in the years in which I was a militant archaeologist, that of the block of San Giacomo in via Bonelli, in Turin, left a particularly clear memory.
It was 1993, I was working for a research cooperative alongside the Piedmontese Superintendency and we had been intent on excavating for several months in the areas of what we now call the Roman quadrilateral – its limits roughly coincide with those of the Roman city, in fact – because the The administration of the then mayor Valentino Castellani had initiated major urban redevelopment projects. Deep excavations were planned in the blocks between Piazza Emanuele Filiberto, via Santa Chiara, via Bonelli and via Sant’Agostino. Before laying the foundations of new buildings it was necessary to verify the existence of pre-existing remains, perhaps significant, and evaluate their documentary importance.
It takes a certain amount of imagination to imagine today what those streets looked like then, before the great transformation that made them a place of entertainment and definitively erased the Dickensian air that marked them: gallery houses leaning against each other in an area that was was the landing place of the first major internal migration, in the 1960s.
The area had always been considered sensitive from an archaeological point of view, we knew (and hoped) that there, in the trench that was beginning to be excavated in the courtyard of via Bonelli 11, we would find something. Moreover, the archaeological data already testified to the existence, in the first centuries of the empire, of a lively urban center in which some artisanal activities took place, of a city characterized by a mighty city wall, with houses that from the 1st-2nd century AD they had been enriched with comforts and painted decorations.
And we were not disappointed.
In fact, it is precisely from Via Bonelli that what is currently considered the most spectacular of the mosaics discovered so far comes from, a floor ornament of a noble residence from the Roman era in Augusta Taurinorum.
It was in fact (but this would have been clear at the end of the long excavation) the largest and best preserved house known in Turin up to that time, located in an insula almost close to the northern section of the walls.
A house with more than ten rooms distributed along an entrance corridor flanked by a room, perhaps a portico, equipped with equipment to collect rainwater in the center of an internal courtyard and other comforts typical of the wealthier classes. A domus that the most important discovery would later allow to be renamed the “house of the dolphin”, from the emblem placed in the center of one of the floors found inside.
The exceptional discovery is today visible at the Museum of Antiquities of Turin where the scenographic location enhances its beauty: The carpet of tiles that covers the entire floor of the room (the mosaic was later removed from its housing of mortar and stones) is decorated with a geometric pattern of eight-lozenge stars with squares and rectangles filled with Solomon’s knots. The stars are arranged in such a way as to create a central space for two figured panels: the smaller upper panel has almost completely disappeared. The lower one has in the central disk the polychrome depiction of a winged cupid riding a dolphin, holding a rod in his right hand.
The entire composition is framed by a black band with a frame of diamonds that decorates only the short side and a small part of the long one, perhaps because the undecorated band had to be hidden by the triclinia that were used for the banquet (Turin Museum).
The excavation lasted several months, the area investigated in its various phases which, as in the other domus of which traces were found, testify to a slow abandonment.
What was left of the house is no longer there. Its remains were documented, photographed, described (Quaderni della Superintendenza archeologica, 1995 and following) and then deleted from the subsequent redevelopment project.
The little love, that’s there. She tirelessly rides his dolphin, delicate and perfect as the expert hand of a mosaicist, far from Rome, had to imagine and create it in the 2nd century AD
