 So, good morning to everybody. I'm going to introduce you to a figure, who, the figure of Carlo Marchesetti, who played a very important role at the beginning of prehistoric archeology in the Capotavria, which is the name we use to indicate the regions of the northeastern part of the Adriatic Sea, basically Trieste, and his surroundings, but also Istria, the peninsula of Istria. And a figure, a scholar, who left an important legacy to the museums, the museums of Trieste. He was born and spent almost all his life in this city, who was part of the House of Austria since 1382 and remained under the Austrian-Hungarian Empire until the First World War. This means that he worked within this context in a territory without boundaries, which, on the contrary, were set up after the First World War. So we have materials from regions, from areas, which are still now in Italy and are in Slovenia. When he left at the beginning, actually, of his career, two museums, which were quite important for him in different ways, as we will see, were established. The first one is the Museum of Natural History, which is the actual name of the museum. It had different names in the past, starting from 1847. And the Museum of Antiquity. When they were founded, they were both in the same building, Palazzo Biserini, then these cohabitations split afterwards. The first one, the first museum, the Museum of Natural History, was very important for him because although he was a doctor, he got his degree in medicine at the University of Vienna, he didn't actually work as a doctor. He had already at that time got quite a good reputation as a botanist and probably for that reason he was appointed in 1876 director of the Civic Museum of Natural History, in a position that he kept for almost 40 years. He was a botanist of the European level, but not only that, he was also an archaeologist of the European level. We have two volumes published by him in 1893. The first one was devoted to the symmetry of Santa Lucia di Colmino, most in Assolci, at that time when he excavated this symmetry, it was under the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, now it is in Slovenia. Ten years later he published a second monograph on the Castellieri preistorici, which means prehistoric hill forts. We will see later on what they are for those who do not yet know it. About 100 years later just at the date of the publication, we decided to organize a meeting, the first one in 1993 where then published a book, The Proceedings, which contain actually an analysis of the figure of Marchesetti from very different points of view, so also his activities as botanist is present in this book. Ten years later we dedicated the meeting to the hill forts of the area, the Priestekarst, Istria and part of northern Danesha. As I said before, there was a split between the seats of the museums and after Marchesetti's test, which took place in 1926, the archeological materials from his investigation were moved to the Museum of Antiquity. I stress the fact that only the archeological materials were moved because in the Civic Museum of Natural History the paleontological materials often coming from the same sites and this is clearly a problem which usually is overcome by a good collaboration between people working in the two museums. Anyway, there is a separation of materials and a few years later the archeological ones were exposed in 18 showcases and 14 of these 18 were at that time dedicated to the symmetry in the properties of Santa Lucia di Tolmino. Besides the monographs as I mentioned earlier and besides the almost 100 publications, articles on his excavations but also on his botanical studies we still have and that is extremely important we still have his notebooks, travel diaries, letters and postcards they are kept mostly in the Civic Library of Trieste and they contain a lot of important information a lot of notes and also a lot of drawings as you can see. Postcards are also important because they allow us to detect the connection he had during his activities just mentioned one single very famous geologist Schliman in history, Luigi Figorini but clearly there are many, many others and we have the possibility to reconstruct his connection through postcards, notes and to reconstruct also all the sides, the map of the sides which means also clearly connection with the scholars not only in Italy in the whole of Europe but we know that he also traveled in Egypt, India and so on we know through his publications through his notes and also through the materials which are still present in the museums so he worked he excavated different typologies of sites he excavated caves not Slovenia actually because he was then more interested in hillforts and cemeteries not only Sant'Aruccio Dittorino but he excavated in caves so what is interesting is that already at that time at the end of the 19th century he was able to recognize the stratigraphy of the deposits this is a copy of one of his manuscript about Grotta Prestorica cave or Tomins cave which is near Trieste at San Canziano-Skociano which is a very interesting site because there is a combination of different caves and all around them traces of human presence from the Neolithic art to the Iron Age as I said he was able to distinguish different layers the quotation says in fact that he found different layers of clay which separated four main archeological layers of ashes and charcoal which indicate different chronological periods that remain essentially unpublished but in any case have been already detected through our studies luckily and from the same cave in Skociano there are a quantity of materials which are now under study by a mixed keep of Slovenian and Italian scholars here are some of the hill forts an example of what a hill fort is which means dry walls stones around the top of small hills where inside remains of paltry remains of floma unfortunately the work done by Marchesetti but not only by him also afterwards was basically a work of serving rather than excavations even in the 1980s 1960s, 1970s there were only very few hill forts quite systematically excavated and very few out of a hundred and more which are spread along as I said before the Trieste Cast and Istria why the work of Marchesetti was nevertheless so important because as these structures as I said before in some walls this means that with time they gradually disappeared due to climatic changes and damages clearly to these structures and also must remember that also some stones were used later on for construction for building also in this case we have quite important notebooks of all these hill forts which nevertheless have been published partially by Marchesetti himself and then we come to certainly the most important excavations because they lasted from for almost twenty years in this site as you can see which has a very important strategic position at the confluence of different rivers in this map you see the location of the cemetery compared to the location of the settlement Marchesetti didn't excavate the settlement Slovenian colleagues excavated some many years later actually from the seventies till the present and finding in almost overlapping of temporary overlapping but not a complete overlapping the cemetery well you can see some of well some of the pictures of his excavations plus the notebooks the notebooks are very interesting because they contain information about the depth of each of each grave the quality, the quantity of the materials of of each grave plus well, miniature but drawings of all of these materials which means that when you are working on them you can be able to identify even from fragments the whole pieces you can imagine 4500 graves excavated by Marchesetti means a very important cemetry for the early ionage the cemetry is dated from the 8th and the end of the 8th and the 4th century BC and when in 1983 there was an important exhibition which attempted to give a a renewed sketch of the situation prehistory and protohistory in this area this cemetry clearly occupied quite a huge position in this exhibition but already before many studies were devoted to this cemetry studies on topography on the topography of the area because that was reconstructable due to the notebooks of Marchesetti again because he left notebooks the diaries you have already seen for each year of his excavations so we have the possibility of studying the evolution of the area separately to the studies on chronology and topography there were studies on chronology different there were different authors proposed different chronologies but as you can see they are somehow overlapping a basic step was also the publication of 2455 other graves excavated by Marchesetti by a contemporary Josef Zombati and half of them are also kept in the Civic Museum of Antiquity before the exhibition other colleagues Italian in this case studied the composition of cave goods in order to try to recognize differences in sex age social position then this study was stopped whilst at the same immediately after another project started with the object of publishing of studying and publishing 1000 graves plus a complete systematic revision of the typology of the materials of the whole symmetry I mean over 6000 graves but unfortunately this project didn't see an end that is why just at the beginning of these years thanks also to a grant we managed to obtain from the region a thorough check of the state of all the materials in the documentation started with the aim of complete the previous one and another one has just been launched to analyze the cremation temperature of the bones paleoradiological analysis which means with the collaboration of the radiologist actually and combine the results with chrono-typological data in order to see if sorry we if and how status and ritual can be connected so just to sum up Carlo Marchesetti had been a very important scholar at the very beginning the fact that his notebooks and his materials are still present allow us and I would say compel us to try to study them in order to let the scientific community know what exist from his excavations in any way also to value clearly his legacy and we cannot promise a new exhibition but I hope to let you know about the results of our project Thank you very much.