Genoa – Thirty-five years ago, thanks to a nascent group of scholars and urban speleologists, the story of a necropolis beneath the Acquasola gardens, a page of history dating back to the great plague which between 1656 and 1657 killed almost two thirds of the Genoese population. A historical treasure discovered and immediately sealed: it was too complex and dangerous to open that underground space to the city. Today, the interrupted story has restarted with a small allocation from the Ministry of Culture and the direct assignment (for a share of 18 thousand euros) to the Genoa Underground Studies Center which has already carried out the first part of the surveys together with the Archaeological Superintendency and finally traced the perimeter and a detailed map of that hidden world. This would be an advance towards other financing. “The target The final goal is to be able to open this extraordinary space to visits, finding a new way of access and inserting it into a historical cultural journey”, reveals the architect of the Superintendency, Simon Luca Trigona.
Now, once the cartographic reconstruction of the underground world has been completed, the possible access door has been identified within the Acquasola park, from a well a few meters from the children's games. But not only that: the collaboration between four universities (Genoa, Urbino, Pavia and Tübingen) opens the doors to surprising developments in the field of medicine and ethnology, while the first clues begin to emerge to trace an increasingly clearer photograph of real population of seventeenth-century Genoa. Because, as every fan of Patricia Cornwell's detective stories and the many fictional anatomopathologists knows very well, bones can tell a story.
History can start again
It was only one man who fought for 35 years to arrive at today's result, which could enrich Genoa's cultural offering, Stefano Saj, creator and animator of the Genoa Underground Studies Centre. He told the beginning of the story several times, also accompanying the Rai television cameras in 2009 with Alberto Angela. «For us who were commonly urban speleologists, relationships with the staff of the then municipal waste water service were frequent. They were the only custodians of the knowledge of sewerage networks – he says today, as that vision takes shape – And when one of them told me that he had found a swan feather floating under a manhole in Viale IV Novembre in Piccapietra, I was struck” . The swans were then in the lake in the Acquasola park, a little further upstream: it was evident that there was an unknown connection between the bastion and the outside. «And, having obtained the permits, after a while I lowered myself into that manhole with three or four other friends».
The rest is the story of an archaeological discovery: walking down a tunnel with his feet in the mud (“But it wasn't a sewer and you could proceed without breathing apparatus”), Saj found himself faced with a forgotten underground world: “I had first come across a tibia and a femur, then into many other human bones, walking bent in a narrow space. Then, lifting myself up in a finally larger pentagonal room, the surprise: a real totem of piled up bones and, in front of me, the Genoese walls built by Andrea Doria in 1568 and buried at the time of the construction of the Acquasola bastions”. There, outside the walls, in the past there was the custom of burying animal carcasses. «But it was easy to understand that at the time of the plague, when there were up to two thousand deaths a day and many corpses were concentrated in the nearby Pammatone hospital, where today the municipal police are located, that custom continued with human bodies». And, even if there can be no documentation of behavior bordering on the sacrilegious, those piles must have been moved two centuries later, in the 19th century, for very practical uses. «When the architect Barabino obtains the commission to build the bastions and the garden of Acquaiola, with the mandate to build a wall that recalls the defensive walls, it is clear that he comes across those piles of skeletons. He has to bury the old walls which at that point no longer have a military purpose. And so he uses that fill material to fill the gaps in the internal galleries, connected by vertical wells to the ground level. There, in that system of tunnels and tunnels, everything that was found was thrown by the truckload: earth, stones and above all bones. Until the last wheelbarrow that is no longer needed and remains there: the totem of bones.”
Interventions by Tursi and the Superintendency
At the instigation of Saj, two distinct projects were born over time: the first by the Municipality of Genoa, the second by the Archaeological Superintendence, with Simon Luca Trigona in charge. In particular, the latter focused on the scientific analysis of anatomical findings taken on a sample basis, by the anthropologist Nico Radi with the Center for Underground Studies, the University of Genoa with the Department of Health Sciences Dissal directed by Giancarlo Icardi (contact person Mariano Martini) and the Universities of Urbino, “Carlo Bo” (Department of Biomolecular Sciences with Michele Betti) and Pavia. Also in the field are the Urbino Speleological Group and the national commission for artificial cavities of the Italian Speleological Society. Finally, Stefano Saj had relaunched his bet at the IV International Congress of speleology in artificial cavities Hypogea 2023, a fundamental event for specialists in the sector, organized last year by the Center for Underground Studies with the support of the Italian Speleological Society. «Thanks to this network at the highest levels, a campaign was organized to collect a series of samples of those bones, with the approval of the Superintendence, which were sent to the Universities of Urbino and Pavia in order to conduct various scientific research. All with the aim of obtaining certain information, first of all on the nature of the deaths but also on many other demographic, ethnological and anthropological aspects”. Those perfectly preserved bones are better than a representative sample used today by opinion polling companies for opinion polls: they represent a heterogeneous group of Genoese inhabitants of the city at a precise moment between 1656 and 1657, people of all social classes, men and women, elderly people and children. And, to those who know how to listen to them, the skeletons of Acquasola can tell many things about the past.
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