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The path of research is often windy. Ten years ago, on a rainy day, I jumped on a car and set out to carry out a field survey in some municipalities of the Greek minority of Salento (Grecìa Salentina, Southern Apulia). I wanted to see if the surviving literature preserved orally bore any trace of… Continue reading Forging human relationships to rediscover ancient words

As you may already know from the post titled “A series of unpredictable events”, the Biblioteca Capitolare of Verona, the oldest library still operating in the Western world, houses a significant number of palimpsests – i.e. manuscripts whose first layer of writing was scraped to allow their reuse – some in Latin, others in Greek.… Continue reading Incredible how you can / See right through me

In an early medieval visionary text, The Journey of Trecenzonius (10th century), the narrator describes how he wanders along a remote and deserted region at the end of the known world, Gallaecia. After the Muslim conquest, everything has been destroyed, but the old Roman lighthouse of Brigantium still stands. He goes to the top, where… Continue reading A remote past still alive

“I see here an excellent track record in Classical and Byzantine philology. And some research on modern Greek linguistics. Listen to me, keep up the good work on the former and ditch the latter: studying the margins will not do much to your career”. I was a young scholar trying to carve a space for… Continue reading “Greek, the language they gave me”… and I am not going to lose it

The doctoral students who will study Greek marginalia and palimpsests in Verona will owe their (hopefully positive) experience to a series of unpredictable events in the professional life of yours truly. My interest in commentaries on the texts of classical Greek literature dates back to my Master’s thesis, in which I worked on Heliodorus’ esoteric… Continue reading A series of unpredictable events…

Spring 1969. A special delivery comes to Odense from Naevsted, a town of medieval origins southeast of Zealand. 40000 books formerly in the possession of Herlusfholm, a four-century old boarding school, are unloaded at the newly founded Syddansk Universitet, which had just welcomed the first students two years before. A treasure trove, which would become… Continue reading Don’t judge a book by its cover… or maybe do?

This is AntBlog, a place where whoever involved in the Doctoral Network “From Antiquity to Community” can share experiences, excitement, successes and – that too – frustrations and failures from within the project. A more personal spin on a four-year ride through manuscripts, languages, archives, monuments, stories from the past and training for the future:… Continue reading Why AntCom