#tombaroli

What Everyone Needs to Know Q&A: 75 people have recently been arrested by the European police for their involvement with looted artwork from war-stricken countries, museums, and other sites. It has been reported that about 3,500 stolen archaeological artifacts and other artworks were recovered by police. As authorities open more investigations related to the looting of antiquities, we want to know:

How does someone become a looter and what do they earn?

Organized criminal gangs are the principal force in looting, since they are normally equipped with the technology and systems to both identify the location of precious works and to remove them clandestinely without attracting notice. The “tombaroli” (tomb robbers) in Mediterranean countries are poorly compensated, but they remand their finds to middle­men who can launder the objects both literally and with re­spect to falsified documentation of their origins.

How are source countries working to counteract looting?

The preparation of source countries to safeguard archaeologi­cal sites varies widely, even within national borders. In Italy, the policing efforts of the national police force known as the Carabinieri are most evident in Rome and points north. The relative lack of organization in Southern Italy and Sicily re­flects a larger challenge of organization in the Mezzogiorno, and explains why looting is more prevalent in the South. But no nation in the world has set up a cultural heritage policing structure as sophisticated as the Carabinieri. Other nations offer less organized protection but may threaten harsher pen­alties, up to the death penalty, as is the case in various develop­ing nations, including Iraq, and very recently in China.

Mexico’s state archaeological authority, INAH (Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia), was taken to task in 2009 and 2012 audits by the Auditoría Superior de la Federación (ASF) for failing to meet even the most fundamental respon­sibilities to protect archaeological sites. Few other report cards of this type have been made public, but the situation in many source nations would receive no better assessment.

[Page 111-112, Antiquities: What Everyone Needs to Know by Maxwell L. Anderson]

Foreword

Through this series of blog posts, I invite you on a journey through the realms of fantasy, traversing imaginary landscapes and the hidden sanctuaries of our everyday lives. Each post will focus on a different film by the Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. I hope you'll enjoy the journey!

Nearly 50 years ago, following a devastating crisis brought about by the rise of television and American blockbusters, Italian cinema crumbled — thus still enduring Berlusconi’s years of backlashes nowadays. This period was marked by the red iron of capitalist interests in the film industry and an undeniable loss of sacred. Independent productions suffered the most and continue to face a severe lack of funding, the closure of movie theaters, and waning public enthusiasm, starkly contrasting the overwhelming dominance of American films domestically.

In response, independent filmmakers like the sweet and poetic Alice Rohrwacher have doubled down on their belief in casual magic and cinema’s ability to re-enchant the world. In her films, from Corpo Celeste (2011) to her latest release, La Chimera (2023), characters embody mythological figures while inhabiting a recognizable reality. They do not need to be heroes or live on Mount Olympus to be compelling protagonists.

With this in mind, under what circumstances do myths permeate the diegesis? Where, in Rohrwacher’s cinema, does the threshold between the ordinary and the extraordinary lie?

The first part of this article aims to illuminate the liminal space between life and death, dreams and reality — the realm where the chimera resides.

Worlds Within Worlds

La Chimera tells the story of the tombaroli — a band of clandestine Etruscan tomb raiders operating in Umbria. Among them is Arthur, "The Englishman" (Josh O’Connor), a melancholic wanderer haunted by the loss of his fiancée, Beniamina. He seems unmoored in time, with no past of his own, yet he possesses a strange gift: the ability to sense the void beneath the earth. His grave-robbing is, at heart, a desperate attempt to draw closer to Beniamina, whose distant voice calls to him from underground.

Beniamina, the embodiment of youth, beauty, and innocence, is trapped in an invisible Inferno — a ruined ancient temple that she inhabits alone, fully alive yet separated from the living. This same temple is unearthed each time Arthur discovers the entrance to an archaeological site, long buried by dust and time. Though she may resemble Eurydice, Arthur is closer to Charon than Orpheus — his gift allows him to transcend the boundary between life and death, attuned to the whispers of a wandering soul lost in the underworld.

We are thus confronted with a double transgression: the blurring of the borders between the living and the dead, just as cinema itself exists in a perpetual state of in-between—between reality and illusion, presence and absence.

According to Michel Foucault, the concept of heterotopia describes spaces that exist apart from the surrounding world, often enclosed and imbued with a sense of discontinuity — like insular spots, cemeteries, or mirrors. In classical Hollywood cinema, the entrance into a different realm includes the leitmotif of a crossing, whether it's the portal to Oz, the looking glass, or the spinning top that lulls a character into a dream. Genre cinema relies on these liminal spaces to transition from reality to fantasy. In La Chimera, however, this passage is denied to Arthur. His attempts to enter another world are visually translated by the inversion of the screen— the frame turns upside down, yet he remains tethered to the tangible, forever on the brink of dreaming, his journey to the beyond perpetually thwarted….

Next week, we will explore how cinema can restore the aura of a place by delving into the film’s archaeological underworld.

— Léane Wendling

Sources :

• MARKOVITZ Eva, REVAULT D'ALLONES Judith, Alice Rochwacher. Le vrai du faux, Les éditions de l'oeil, Paris, 2023, 192p.

SEQUESTRATI ANTICHI MANUFATTI DESTINATI AL MERCATO ILLECITO, GERUSALEMME

Centinaia di reperti antichi, incluse ciotole ceramiche inscritte e rari manufatti in osso e avorio ascrivibili a partire dal periodo della monarchia biblica fino al IV secolo d.C., sono stati sequestrati durante un’operazione dell’Unità salvaguardia del patrimonio dell’Israel Antiquities Authority e della polizia di Lev HaBira contro un residente di Gerusalemme, del quartiere Ramat Shlomo,…

Reperti archeologici, smantellata banda di tombaroli

Dalle prime luci dell’alba, è in corso una vasta operazione dei Carabinieri del Comando Tutela Patrimonio Culturale e dell’Arma Territoriale, coordinata dalla Procura della Repubblica di Termini Imerese (Palermo), in diverse province siciliane, nei confronti di un’organizzazione criminale dedita al traffico di opere di interesse archeologico provento di scavi clandestini in vari siti dell’isola.