Doclea nei resoconti di viaggio italiani tra la fine del XIX e l’inizio del XX secolo
DOCLEA IN ITALIAN TRAVEL WRITING AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH AND THE BEGINNING OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Summary/Abstract: The territory of present-day Montenegro formed an integral part of the Roman province of Praevalis during the period of the Roman Empire. The most important ancient sites in this area were Doclea, Rizon and Municipium S. European scholarly interest in Doclea was initiated by the discovery of the socalled Podgorica Cup at this site. The depictions of biblical motifs painted on it attracted particular attention from specialists in Christian archaeology. Among them were also Italians, such as De Rossi, while the value of this artefact was first recognised by the Italian consul in Scutari, Lorenzo Perrod, who was responsible for its transfer to the collection of the great collector Vasilievsky. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, with the growth of Italian interest in Montenegro, the subject of its ancient sites also became increasingly present in Italian literature. Travel writers could acquire knowledge on this subject either directly during their journeys or from the existing literature, dominated by encyclopaedic dictionaries and lexicons, as well as by the works of Sanudo and Coletti, which were primarily focused on medieval and renaissance history but also contained certain references to earlier historical events. More extensive and thorough contributions, aspiring to present Montenegro in a systematic manner, appeared in the form of travel accounts published in prestigious periodicals or monographs. The experience of the Risorgimento led the Italian public, from the 1870s onwards, to follow the national liberation movements in the Balkans, particularly in Montenegro, with considerable sympathy and interest. In the works of Italian travel writers and publicists of this period, such as Eugenio Popovich, Alfredo Serristori and Nicola Lazzaro, a heroic discourse predominates, depicting the Montenegrins as Christian knights whose valiant struggle expelled Ottoman oppressors from Europe. Within these accounts, Montenegro’s ancient sites are mentioned only in passing, either as settings for military operations or as stops along travel itineraries. From 1896 onwards, following the dynastic alliance between the Montenegrin and Italian royal houses, Italian public interest in Montenegro increased rapidly. The travel literature produced on this occasion had a pronounced propagandistic character and fulfilled three important functions: it introduced Italians to a country, the homeland of their future queen, that until then had been almost unknown to them; it enhanced the prestige of the Montenegrin ruling dynasty; and it highlighted the historical ties that had existed between the two countries in earlier periods. In their search for a shared past, Italian authors devoted most attention to the presence of the Venetian Republic on the Montenegrin coast and to its relations with the Montenegrin tribes in the neighbouring hinterland, as well as to its support and encouragement of their struggle for liberation against the Ottoman Empire. Most of these authors visited Doclea, and two of them, Vico Mantegazza and Adolfo Rossi, had the privilege of doing so in the company of Italian Prince Vittorio Emanuele III. Rossi emphasises that Doclea was the birthplace of the Emperor Diocletian, while his description of the site goes little beyond expressions of admiration for the presumed former magnificence of the buildings whose remains he had the opportunity to see. By the time Rossi and Mantegazza visited, several archaeological missions had already carried out excavations at Doclea. The first, in 1890, was led by the Russian scholar, Pavel Rovinsky. A much more qualified research campaign conducted in September 1892, consisted of the Triestine Piero Sticotti and the Split-born Luka Jelić, joined by Vido Petričević, also from Split. Sticotti left an account of this journey in the form of diary notes written in Italian. Unlike many authors, who usually mention Doclea only in passing, he devoted his notes specifically to this site as the principal object of his mission, which consisted of photographing the site and sketching plans of the structures excavated by Rovinsky. The work of Sticotti and Jelić resulted in the monograph Die Römische Stadt Doclea in Montenegro (1913) which for more than a century remained the most comprehensive study of ancient Doclea. The research campaign carried out in 1893 by a British mission led by Munro focused primarily on the traces of the late-antique and early-medieval layers at the site (Basilica A, Basilica B and a cruciform church). Like most Italian and other European visitors to Doclea, Vico Mantegazza also bears witness to the continuous devastation of the site. He supplements the brief description of Doclea by Mariano Bolizza from 1614 with his own personal testimony, noting that some of the objects mentioned by Bolizza were no longer to be found at Doclea. Mantegazza records that certain architectural fragments from the site were located around the Prince’s palace at Kruševac. In presenting the Montenegrin past, he also relied to a considerable extent on the work History of Montenegro (1882) by the Dalmatian publicist and translator Giacomo Chiudina, in which, according to the German scholar Mommsen, several inscriptions from the site preserved in the Prince’s palace at Cetinje were mentioned. The aforementioned description of Doclea from the work of Mariano Bolizza is also cited by Giuseppe Marcotti, although it is uncertain whether this author personally visited the site. His account, which appears in two works, L’Adriatico orientale and Il Montenegro e le sue donne, may have been based on the extensive literature he cites there. Referring readers to Farlati’s Illyricum Sacrum, Marcotti disputes the claims of earlier authors concerning the birthplace of the Emperor Diocletian. He also reminds readers that until the tenth century Doclea was the seat of an archbishopric, which was later transferred to Bar. He attributes the destruction of Doclea to the campaign of the Bulgarian Tsar Simeon, whom he confuses with Samuel of Macedonia. Mario Borsa writes about the ongoing investigations at Doclea initiated by Pavel Rovinsky, and his work represents the finest literary travel account on Montenegro from this period. Borsa’s description reveals his perception of past epochs and civilisations in contrast to the modern age. He emphasises the development, magnificence and splendour of this centre of Roman civilisation in comparison with the unimpressive appearance of Podgorica, the largest town in contemporary Montenegro. By presenting the Roman ruins as a symbol of lost civilisational greatness – through stressing their rational construction, proportions, hygienic conditions and aesthetic and even moral superiority – while depicting contemporary Montenegro as a space of aesthetic and cultural inferiority, Borsa employs a narrative of ruins as sources of fascination, carriers of memory and measures of civilisational value. His approach reflects both a nostalgia for the classical world and a condescending attitude towards the modern peoples living among those ruins without awareness of their greatness. At the turn of the twentieth century, Montenegro also attracted the interest of the scholarly public concerned with the study of its natural resources. In 1899, the geographer Guido Cora visited the country and left an account of his monthlong stay in the travelogue Nel Montenegro. Cora’s work also contains an overview of Montenegrin history, from the period of the Roman Empire to modern times. The author devotes particular attention to the ties between Montenegro and Italy, nostalgically recalling the period when these relations were much more intense, namely when the territory of Montenegro formed part of the Roman Empire and when the coasts of the Bay of Kotor were ruled by the Venetian Republic. Cora regarded the Venetian presence on the eastern Adriatic coast as a powerful civilising influence, while at the same time expressing his fear that Slavic influence might erase its traces. In this travelogue, Cora provides a detailed geographical description of the location and appearance of Doclea. He took photographs, made sketches, copied inscriptions and collected a number of Roman coins. He informs readers that Prince Nikola of Montenegro possessed a significant collection of coins and artefacts from the site. Cora did not publish his sketches or transcriptions of inscriptions in the travelogue itself, announcing instead that the material gathered at the site would become the subject of a separate study. Upon returning to his homeland, this author attempted to organise a major Italian expedition that would study Montenegro, and especially Doclea, from a variety of scientific perspectives. He presented his project to Italian Crown Prince Victor Emmanuel and Princess Elena in order to secure support for its implementation. The expedition, however, was never organised due to a lack of financial resources. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Italian government had begun to recognise the potential of using archaeological research as an instrument of expansion in the Mediterranean. Taking Austria-Hungary and the research projects it conducted in Bosnia as a model, Minister Nasi, followed by Prime Minister Zanardelli, supported the idea of organising a scientific expedition to Montenegro under the leadership of Antonio Baldacci, a botanist who had regularly visited Montenegro since 1885 and had documented his stays in the form of travel accounts and scholarly studies. Baldacci expected rich archaeological discoveries relating to Greek and Roman colonisation, particularly the remains of Roman trading and military stations and roads. Behind this “nostalgia for antiquity” lay his undisguised desire to restore Rome’s economic and military presence in the Balkans and to transform the Adriatic into an “Italian sea” – Mare Nostrum. Both Cora and Baldacci displayed a certain rivalry stemming from the fact that other states had already conducted archaeological missions at a site they perceived as part of Italian heritage. In addition to Baldacci, the members of the mission, which carried out research in the principality during August and September and partly in the territory of Albania, included Professor Dante Vaglieri, Inspector of Archaeological Monuments, and Professor Ugo Vram of the Anthropological Institute in Rome, among others. Antonio Baldacci and Ugo Vram both left accounts of their stay in Montenegro in the form of travel writings. Baldacci described the course of the mission in his travelogue Nel paese del Cem. In it, he provided information about the participants themselves, their research activities within the expedition, their arrival and departure dates, as well as the logistical assistance they received from the Montenegrin authorities. Baldacci did not describe the site of Doclea itself, and among his rich collection of photographs taken in Montenegro only a few were made at Doclea. From Baldacci’s work we learn that the researchers studied the terrain on which the Roman settlement had been built, the aqueduct that supplied it with water from the River Cem, and the roads connecting it with nearby centres. Ugo Vram’s travel diary, however, contains no information about the investigations carried out at Doclea. In 1903, the Italian government again financed a smaller scientific mission in Montenegro, once more headed by Baldacci, though without Vram and Vaglieri. From an archaeological perspective, after the reconnaissance undertaken in 1902, the logical next step would have been the organisation of systematic investigations or excavations at Doclea or at another archaeological site. However, the Italian government ultimately decided not to undertake such a project. It may be concluded that the ancient sites in Montenegro remained largely unknown to the Italian public throughout almost the entire nineteenth century. More detailed research and greater familiarity with these sites emerged only from the 1890s onwards, owing primarily to the contributions of scholars from the Habsburg Monarchy, Russia, Great Britain and Italy. However, most of this information was not accessible to the wider reading public and was often not even used by those travel writers who carefully prepared their journeys with the explicit intention of writing travel accounts on Montenegro. In Italian travel writing published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, descriptions of Doclea rarely go beyond a few brief and usually superficial observations, based either on personal impressions or on limited literary sources. Nevertheless, these descriptions fulfilled several functions: from disseminating knowledge about Montenegro’s ancient heritage to emphasising the need to restore an Italian presence on the eastern Adriatic coast. In the works of journalists who wrote about the site in connection with the Savoy–Petrović marriage, Doclea represented a symbol of the long-standing ties between Italy and Montenegro, ties now being renewed through dynastic alliance. By recalling the shared history of Montenegrins and Italians and stressing the former importance of this Roman urban centre, the authors sought to make the homeland of the future Italian queen – a small Orthodox Slavic state – more familiar to Italian readers. Such efforts were also encouraged by comments circulating in fashionable circles that it would have been more appropriate for the prince to have chosen a bride from one of the influential European courts, from a country already allied with Italy or from which Italy might have gained certain geopolitical advantages. Some authors also used descriptions of Doclea to underline the superiority of their own culture, glorifying the former magnificence and power of the Roman Empire. Mario Borsa is a notable example, and his impressions at the same time constitute the most striking literary description of the site. Over time, this “nostalgia for antiquity” evolved into imperialist aspirations, as demonstrated by the aims of the Italian scientific mission conducted in Montenegro in 1902, which were likewise described in the travel writings of the expedition’s members. The efforts of the Italian authorities to enhance the prestige of Italian archaeology through research at Doclea were used by certain travel writers, above all Baldacci, to secure governmental support for their ambitious multidisciplinary projects. The expectations of the Montenegrin authorities regarding major archaeological discoveries were ultimately not fulfilled. Among Italians, the greatest contribution to the excavations at Doclea was made, through his monograph, by a Triestine scholar working within Austro-Hungarian academic institutions.

• Details
• Contents