CHAPTER ONE
Hidden in the Western world’s greatest epic lies the tragic story of an obscure prince named Sarpedon. His fight to the death is often forgotten amid the star-studded cast of Homer’s Iliad. But seven centuries after the fabled Trojan War, Sarpedon’s blood-drenched demise inspired Euphronios to create ceramic masterpieces in his Athens workshop. One was the krater pot depicting Sarpedon that would end up in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The other, a kylix drinking cup bearing the same decoration, would become the lost chalice.
During his career, in the years just before 500 B.C., Euphronios’s works were possessions that were prized far from Greece’s shores. Like most of his known vases, the Sarpedon cup and its bigger match made their way across the Mediterranean on ships sailed either by Greeks or their foreign trading partners, the Etruscans, who inhabited a land called Etruria in what is today modern Italy. Comparatively little is known about the Etruscans, a civilization predating the Romans. Their remains have been found in the part of Italy now know as Tuscany, and in Rome’s northern suburbs. The word Tuscany even comes from “Etruscan.”
The Etruscans imported so many Greek vases—and buried so many of them in their tombs—that archaeologists once mistakenly believed these pots had been made in Italy. Of all the known works by Euphronios with documented archaeological origins, only one turned up in Athens. All the others were dug up in Etruria. And of those, most came from sites in the city of Caere, which today is an Italian town called Cerveteri. The wealthier, social-climbing Etruscans in Caere built collections, snapping up imported vases by Euphronios and his Athenian competitors. When these Etruscan connoisseurs died, they and their collections of goblets and statues were buried in stone tombs modeled after the layouts of their homes.
In tracing the exact path of Euphronios’s greatest works, the trail largely goes cold in the necropolis of ancient Cerveteri. Over the past century, tomb robbers have destroyed almost all evidence of the pots’ ancient life stories—and by extension, our ability to decipher the history of the Etruscans.
But not all is lost. We do know that sometime around 400 B.C., the Etruscans who had been lucky enough to own Euphronios’s Sarpedon krater and kylix buried them in the soil of Caere. Although the Etruscans who bought the chalice and krater may remain an enigma, we know the journey of the twin pots starts at a burial ground of stone tombs north of Rome, where the Etruscans sealed their treasures behind simple sepulcher doors. The Sarpedon chalice and its bigger twin sat in darkness for twenty-four hundred years.
Young Dietrich von Bothmer was twelve years old when he saw his first Euphronios vase, a krater pot for mixing wine, painted with a scene of nude athletes at a gymnasium. What von Bothmer saw during that visit to the Berlin Antikensammlung museum, probably in 1931, was a tableau of young men getting dressed and undressed amid equally naked servant boys. On one side of the two-handled keg, on which the clay-colored figures glow against a black background, a youth holds a jar out of which he pours oil for rubdowns. An athlete plays with his discus while a toga-wearing pal extends an index finger toward the discus thrower’s penis. In all, they seem to be having a fine time at the gym.
Von Bothmer decided on the spot to become an archaeologist. And the discipline certainly could use passionate, new talent to help bridge the gaps in knowledge of the past that centuries of treasure hunting and tomb robbing had left.
One example of the challenges facing archaeology sat in front of von Bothmer at the Berlin museum. Little was known at the time about the krater that had captured his imagination; it had been dug up just north of Naples in Capua, an ancient city on the Appian Way, one of the longer roads that famously lead to Rome. But its earlier origins were a matter of interpretation. Even the attribution of the vase to Euphronios was an educated guess, as the krater bore no signature.
Without signatures or without knowing where such pots were found, museums, collectors, and scholars relied on stylistic comparisons. This pot looked like a Euphronios. And the man who had the final say was at Oxford. Sir John Beazley, professor of archaeology and the world’s leading authority on Greek pots, declared that the krater was a Euphronios. And so it was.
Confronted with collections and museums packed with pots of unknown origins, Beazley devised a system for grouping and attributing ancient vases that was based largely on interpreting styles. That remains the standard today. With so few vases having signatures, Beazley and his colleagues had to invent names for the artists. The painter of one particularly fine vase, which sits near the Euphronios that inspired young von Bothmer, was dubbed the Berlin Painter, after the German museum. Now, following Beazley’s system, any vase that resembles the technique of the original “Berlin Painter” is given the same attribution.
Even in his native Germany, Dietrich von Bothmer learned of Beazley’s mastery of Greek pots. It was just a matter of time before von Bothmer followed his youthful fascination all the way to Beazley’s office. In 1938, the promising archaeologist sailed to England and went up to Oxford as one of Germany’s last Rhodes scholars admitted before war erupted.
Oxford was, and is, a place as confusing as it is fascinating, a conglomeration of a few dozen semiautonomous colleges and as many academic departments, museums, and labs. The nineteen-year-old von Bothmer was lost as soon as he arrived.
Oxford’s Wadham College had admitted him as a student for the diploma in classical archaeology, but when von Bothmer got to Wadham, a fellow of the college said he needed to hike over to Christ Church, the college where his tutor—the faculty member responsible for preparing him for his exams—was based. Map in hand, young Dietrich, speaking imperfect English, made his way to the edge of the campus and learned from his alleged tutor at Christ Church that he’d be supervised by Professor Beazley. Beazley, said the Christ Church don, was expecting von Bothmer at the university’s Ashmolean Museum.
Von Bothmer found Beazley in the museum’s library—where the professor was writing out excerpts from the latest issue of the journal Monumenti Antichi—and began the most important relationship of his career.
Almost every working day, from the start of the Michaelmas term, through the following two trimesters that composed the academic year, Beazley and von Bothmer slipped into a routine. Just before 1:00 P.M., Beazley would get up from his chair in the library and ask his student, “Are you going back to Wadham?” Von Bothmer was, of course, returning for lunch at his college, which was in the same direction as Beazley’s house at 100 Holywell Street. The student took the extra five minutes to accompany the world’s top expert in Greek vases all the way to the two-story stone house at the bottom of the narrow lane.
The two would talk freely, and almost no subject was off-limits. Beazley would catch and correct von Bothmer’s mistakes in English, but in a way that made the young man see that he would some day master this foreign tongue. On Fridays von Bothmer would return to 100 Holywell for an added treat, tea at 4:00 P.M. Beazley, his wife, and an assortment of guests would gather in the dining room for snacks, and for an entire hour Beazley would say nothing.
Then, at 5:00 P.M. sharp, the professor would stand and lead his three or four students into the study, where for two hours they pored over photographs and actual fragments of ancient vases, which they could handle and turn in their own hands. Beazley would ask the students questions and fill in the gaps in their knowledge. But it was the physical connection to the decorated pot shards that von Bothmer would recall as the most rewarding part of his education at Oxford. In fact, the mentorship he built with Beazley would prove to have the biggest payoff. For in just one year, he managed to position himself as Beazley’s eventual successor as the world’s top authority on the authenticity and artistry of Greek vessels.
The same year von Bothmer left for Oxford, the man who would some day determine the fate of the Sarpedon chalice came into the world in Rome. On July 6, 1938, Giuseppa Frisoni gave birth to her son, Giacomo, in an apartment on Via della Lupa, a cobblestoned alley where she lived with her husband, Guido Medici, and their two older children in a building with ancient foundations next to the hulking Palazzo Borghese. Guido eked out a living digging up ancient tombs and temples. He wasn’t an archaeologist, and it wasn’t entirely clear if his treasure hunting was legal. But harvesting statues and vases from the lumpy fields north of Rome was a reliable way to feed a growing family.
It went without saying that the infant Giacomo Medici would probably go into the family business. What nobody in their crowded walk-up could know is that young Giacomo, the boy with the green eyes, would uncover the greatest treasures ever found on Italian soil. That he would rise through the profession to provide ancient loot to the world’s biggest museums and richest private collections was beyond their imaginations.
These Medici—the Medici of Rome—could never be confused with the noble Medici of Florence. Five centuries earlier, those Medici had financed the Renaissance, produced three popes, and hired Michelangelo and Botticelli as their interior designers. Giacomo Medici, on the other hand, had only the name and its contrast with his current station in life, perched above a dark alleyway in Rome’s rabbit warren of medieval streets.
Men like Giacomo Medici and his father had made a living off antiquities for centuries. During the Grand Tour of the 1700s and 1800s, his predecessors guided acquisitive Englishmen on shopping sprees amid the ruins of ancient civilizations. The tourist-explorers hauled off the contents of newly cracked tombs and built collections that furnished stately country homes and London sitting rooms. Little had changed by 1938. Guido’s clients were rich Italian families, and his excavation was often done with permits from the government’s cultural authorities. He worked the land with a shovel and spillo, the long, steel spear with which antiquities diggers probe the soil in hopes of hearing the telltale clink from the top of a buried tomb.
A year after young Giacomo’s birth, Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini, pushed through a law that would doom the Medici family business. His government declared that any artifact found on Italian soil was the property of the state. A similar law had already been on the books since 1909, but the 1939 legislation—based on Mussolini’s brand of militaristic nationalism—made the issue crystal clear. Mussolini knew his ancient civilizations, and he fancied himself a modern Caesar.
For the Medici family, the antiquities law was an annoyance compared with the real hardships they faced as Mussolini allied with Hitler and drew Italy into war with the British and Americans. Rome became a target for Allied invasion, so by 1940, Guido Medici evacuated his family to the countryside.
The Medici clan ventured twenty-five miles north to Giuseppa’s hometown, Fiano Romano, where they joined Giacomo’s grandparents, Luigi and Luigia. Being situated in the middle of ancient Etruscan territory was perfect for Guido’s digging. And the kids—Roberto, the eldest; Caterina, known as Rina; and Giacomo, the youngest—had fields to play in, animals to feed, and doting grandparents to look after them. The hardship and brutality of war were kept at bay a little longer and crept up slowly.
Fiano Romano sits on a hill surrounded by farmland. Atop the hill, in the oldest part of the town, a fifteenth-century duke’s castle lords over the terrain. Giacomo Medici’s grandparents lived just a hundred yards from the castle, which German troops had occupied. Guido, his wife, and three kids lived nearby, above a shop that pressed olives into olive oil, in a two-bedroom home.
At first the war seemed like a spectator sport to the kids. After dark, Giacomo and his friends climbed onto roofs at the highest points in Fiano Romano to take in the panorama. In the distance they could see bombs falling. Allied aircraft dropped flares that turned night into day, illuminating the fields and surrounding hills. American B-17 Flying Fortress bombers came over the horizon in V-shaped formations, the four engines of each plane combining to create a low-pitched hum of an approaching swarm.
As the spring of 1944 began, the bombs always dropped on someone else’s city. For Giacomo, the fireworks were a diversion. Then, on the morning of May 27, 1944, Giacomo learned war was anything but a game.
After breakfast on that Saturday, he was roaming the neighborhood with the independence of a boy his age, two months shy of six. His grandmother was at home caring for the newest member of the family, her eleven-month-old granddaughter, named Luigia after her. Around 10:00 A.M., the air sirens sounded.
As he’d done many times before, Giacomo jogged over to the bomb shelter, a wine cellar deep beneath a neighbor’s house, but opened for communal use in emergencies. From inside he could hear the familiar sound of the low-flying bombers—a droning hum of propellers—followed by the whistle of dozens of small missiles dropping through the sky. A quick series of explosions followed, boomboomboomboom, as the carpet of ordnance hit the ancient landscape. Luckily for Giacomo, those sounds were distant. The bombs had fallen far from the town.
After the racket drifted away, the lookouts sounded an all-clear siren. The doors to the shelter flung open and Giacomo, tired of being cooped up and just spooked enough to seek the security of his grandmother, skipped toward her red-roofed house to see what fun he could find.
That’s when the sound came back. The Allied aircraft had turned around. Nobody had time to raise the alarm before the bombs started to drop. Giacomo raced for his grandmother’s home as the Flying Fortresses took aim at the castle at the top of the hill in which the Nazis were ensconced. But the tiny Frisoni house wasn’t far from the target—and the bombers’ aim wasn’t good.
Inside, fifty-eight-year-old Luigia scooped up her infant namesake to shelter the baby from the onslaught. Outside, Giacomo made his last dash for the front door. One of the bombs scored a direct hit on the house.
A few blocks away, another bomb smashed into the two-story building where Giacomo lived with his parents and siblings. In the fields below Fiano Romano, the carpet bombing hit a farm about a mile away where Giacomo’s grandfather, Luigi, was working. The explosions killed the sheep and goats he was tending and left him gravely injured. The Medici house was crushed, but it had been empty and nobody was hurt.
The bomb that hit the grandmother’s house took the greatest toll. It smashed down, first through the clay roof tiles and then through the heavy wooden beams. A pile of terra-cotta and timber engulfed the two Luigias. It would take three days to dig out their bodies. When they did, they found the baby still wrapped tight in her grandmother’s protective embrace.
Giacomo never made it into the house. When the bomb exploded, it sent a six-inch slice of hot shrapnel into his skull. The last thing he saw was the front door. And then everything went black.
The war also put Dietrich von Bothmer’s life in grave danger. After just a year of studies, Oxford awarded him a diploma in classical studies. Then, as Germany and England prepared for battle, the fighting-age von Bothmer left for the United States, sailing on June 28, 1939, from Southampton to New York on the Queen Mary. His mission was to visit museums on behalf of Beazley, gathering data that his mentor would include in his definitive catalogs of Athenian red-figure and black-figure vases.
America teemed with new and growing museums and rich collectors such as newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. Here was a fresh frontier for finding newly excavated Greek pots that had crossed the Atlantic. Europe’s collections were already well documented, its collectors too poor and its museum curators mostly concerned with protecting their treasures from wartime bombardment. Von Bothmer had come to the right place at the right time.
He spent the next few years trying to solidify his credentials so that Beazley could eventually pass the torch to him. From 1940 to 1942, von Bothmer studied at the University of California at Berkeley. He then spent a year at the University of Chicago before hopping back to Berkeley. Since the ongoing fighting on the Atlantic prevented him from returning home, and he also had his eye on eventual U.S. citizenship, von Bothmer enlisted in the army in San Francisco on October 26, 1943. A few months later, the University of California awarded him his PhD, and then he shipped out to the Pacific for a tour through New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines.
In 1944, as bombs fell on the countryside around Rome, von Bothmer was fighting the Japanese in the Pacific, as a private in the Thirty-first Infantry Division of the U.S. Army. On August 11, twenty-five-year-old von Bothmer joined a patrol behind enemy lines in Dutch New Guinea, near Sarmi, a town on the north coast of what is today the Papua province of Indonesia. The patrol took fire, and von Bothmer was hit in both legs. The other soldier with him was wounded even worse. And the two of them were stuck five miles inside Japanese territory.
Giacomo Medici lay on the ground beside the rubble of his grandparents’ house when the bombs stopped falling just before 11:00 A.M. Blood streamed from the gash in his skull where the shrapnel had embedded. Even worse, blood gushed from the boy’s nose, and pink foam frothed from his ears.
“It’s brain matter, brain matter!” Giacomo’s mother heard a horrified neighbor scream as she rushed to his side. “He’s going to die, he’s going to die.” As villagers tried to dig through the rubble that had buried Giacomo’s grandmother and baby sister, hoping to find survivors, they debated whether they should even bother seeking help for the boy.
As Giacomo’s limbs flinched spasmodically and blood continued to flow from his ears, the crowed decided to haul the boy down to the pharmacy, the closest thing Fiano Romano had to a medical clinic. Giacomo would probably die at the pharmacy, but at least they would have tried something. From the pharmacy, his family managed to flag down a U.S. Army jeep, whose soldiers agreed to drive the boy thirteen miles south to the hospital in the small city of Monterotondo. When they dropped him off, Giacomo was unconscious but still breathing.
As the day wore on, it became clear that the nearly six-year-old boy had fallen into a coma. One day passed, and then another. The bleeding stopped, and nurses covered the slice in his head with gauze. Finally, a week after Allied forces bombed his house and then helped save his life, Giacomo’s senses returned. On June 4, a few days after Giacomo regained consciousness, Allied troops took the Italian capital. But for the boy whose wound wouldn’t heal, the war was far from over.
Under the bandages, Giacomo’s head was a pool of pus. Antibiotics were scarce. After a month, with the gash still open, a man from Fiano Romano came to collect him, driving a wooden cart pulled by a single horse. The paesano loaded him in, hopped up into his seat, grabbed the reins, and headed north.
As they climbed the hill into Fiano Romano, neighbors on the side of the road cheered for the boy.
In the Pacific, from five miles behind the Japanese front line, the wounded von Bothmer managed to carry his fellow GI to safety. For his heroics, the U.S. Army awarded him the Bronze Star. He might have won a greater honor, the Silver Star, but that would have required two witnesses and von Bothmer had only one—the man whose life he’d saved. The United States did, however, make him a citizen.
After he recovered from his wounds in a military hospital, the U.S. Army discharged von Bothmer in March 1946. Armed with a PhD and references from the famous Beazley, von Bothmer headed east to New York. The job hunt was a cinch for the decorated war hero and credentialed classicist. By the next month, he landed a spot at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant in the Greek and Roman department.
He’s been there ever since, for better and, sometimes, worse.
Left homeless by the bombing, the Medici family moved to the edge of town into an improvised shelter crafted from a cave. Giacomo, normally a chubby kid, became thin from lack of food. At the same time, the swelling from his injury had the disturbing effect of making his green eyes bulge out of his skull.
Crime was rampant, and Medici and his family were often victims. Giacomo lived in fear of having his bread stolen, or worse, as desperation drove some villagers to violence in the quest for scarce resources. Giacomo’s recovery didn’t go well. It would be several years before his eyeballs would shrink back into his head. He fell four years behind in his studies, partly due to the interruptions of war and partly because he hadn’t regained all his mental and physical abilities. When his parents reenrolled him in school at age ten, Giacomo could barely function as a student. At a time when his cohort could write words, his attempts to draw the letters of the alphabet came out as incoherent scribbles.
The hardships made it more important than ever for Giacomo’s father to find steady work excavating antiquities. His best chance came in the late 1940s when he went to work digging for Prince Vittorio Massimo, the head of Rome’s oldest noble family.
The Massimo family traces its roots back twenty-two hundred years—and its properties contained ruins, tombs, and treasures even older than the ancient dynasty itself. Among the projects that Prince Massimo hired Guido Medici to excavate was Lucus Feroniae, a shrine surrounded by ruins of a Roman amphitheater, baths, basilica, and other buildings. Worshippers at this shrine had made offerings of statuettes made of stone, clay, and bronze. Guido and Prince Massimo set about collecting them.
For the curly-haired prince, these were excavations into his own family’s past. He was descended from a general, Fabius Maximus, who’d saved Rome from Hannibal’s advancing army by using delay tactics that wore out the Carthaginian troops from 217 to 214 B.C. Going back even further in time, the modern prince could trace his lineage into the haze of mythology. His ancestor Fabius Maximus was said to be the great-great-grandson of none other than Heracles, the muscular hero of Greek and Roman myth, also known as Hercules. (Heracles, according to the Greek biographer Plutarch’s The Parallel Lives, had consorted with a nymph next to the Tiber River, and she gave birth to a boy, Fabius.) But the family tree didn’t stop there. Heracles, in turn, was a son of Zeus.
That, of course, makes Heracles a half brother of Sarpedon, the Lycian prince whom Euphronios painted on both the krater and the lost chalice. Or to put it another way: the modern prince who hired Guido Medici to dig up his fields was related to the ancient prince whose death was depicted on a vase hidden somewhere in the ground nearby.
Giacomo saw some of his first dig sites during his father’s collaboration with the prince in the decade after the war. He inherited his father’s passion for antiquities. And the time he spent around Prince Massimo showed him what it meant to be rich, to have a grand heritage, and, by extension, how to live up to the Medici name. Giacomo surmised from Prince Massimo’s example that antiquities were a mark of aristocracy. An artifact could give a man a material connection to a past he could call his own.
Giacomo was in awe of the prince and his possessions. When not at his residence in Rome, Prince Massimo lived in a castle on the edge of Fiano Romano, a real crenellated heap with a tower and a big central courtyard, called Castello di Scorano. To Giacomo’s delight, his father often brought him along on visits to the castle to conduct business. When the massive doors of Castello di Scorano swung open, what he discovered was something out of Ali Baba’s cave. Prince Massimo had piled his archaeological finds in the open-air quadrangle. Indoor storerooms burst with artifacts big and small that the prince had stacked to the ceilings.
As if that didn’t make a big enough impression, on April 29, 1954, Giacomo got his first taste of the international high life. Prince Massimo married the British film actress Dawn Addams, who had starred in B movies such as that year’s science fiction feature Riders to the Stars. After a ceremony in Rome, the couple rode their black sedan up to the castle in Fiano Romano for a buffet reception in the courtyard. Giacomo watched from the sidelines, agog.
A bowtied Charlie Chaplin sat at a round table in the garden with his wife, Oona O’Neill, daughter of the playwright Eugene O’Neill. American and Italian actors mingled with a former Miss Italy and members of the minor Italian royalty. Giacomo, wearing shorts, mingled with the kitchen staff and ate leftovers.
Giacomo was fifteen years old and he was seeing what he wanted in life in a neat package of celebrity, riches, and antiquities.
Now he’d just have to grab it.
Giacomo and his older brother, Roberto, learned more and more about the antiquities trade as their father got deeper into his work as a digger and, increasingly, as a dealer with his own stall at Rome’s outdoor antiquarian market on Piazza Borghese.
One impediment to the family’s progress in the years just after the war was that legally their profession was becoming riskier. The police started to apply Mussolini’s antiquities law on occasion, but more often they would look the other way. Private landowners could apply to the cultural authorities for permits to dig on their own land. When a landowner found a statue or pot of significant value and turned it over to the government, he’d be paid a premio, or reward, to compensate him. The landowner would also hold on to some of the stash, even if he wasn’t supposed to. As long as the government got material for its museums, everyone stayed happy.
This informal system lacked archaeological rigor and record keeping. Beautiful works of art sprung from the ground, but even if they ended up in museums, nobody would ever know exactly where they’d been found or what other objects or human remains they had been buried alongside.
In the decade following the war, the flawed but orderly traditional system of rich men looting off their own estates in collaboration with the authorities fell apart. Post-Fascist agrarian reforms chopped up feudal landholdings and handed them over to the people. Instead of one rich family conducting digs in official or unofficial concert with the authorities, thousands of poor families suddenly owned land from which they needed to make a living by planting and harvesting food. The antiquities beneath their plows were either riches to secretly sell or, if they got the police involved, potential obstacles to their farming livelihoods. There was the risk the government would seize the land if the find was important enough. The compensation could be paltry.
As the antiquities trade began its transition from a nineteenth-century gentleman’s game, and the authorities started to clamp down, the Medici family managed to squeeze some good out of the government. Giacomo’s shrapnel gash qualified him for state benefits as a war invalid. In 1956, the government awarded Giacomo a scholarship that gave him housing and food at a dormitory in L’Aquila, a town in the neighboring region of Abruzzi. He enrolled at the Istituto Tecnico Industriale Amedeo di Savoia Duca D’Aosta—a technical school. Giacomo was already eighteen years old when he started his high school training as an electrician, a profession he would never take up.
In New York, the other men whose lives would intersect with Medici’s were also carving out careers. On July 2, 1959, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it was promoting von Bothmer to curator of Greek and Roman art. At the bottom of the announcement, which included several other promotions and was carried in the New York Times, was this news: “Also added to the Cloisters’ staff is Thomas P. F. Hoving, curatorial assistant.”
Hoving was twenty-eight years old at the time and had already had his share of adventures. A rich kid whose father was chairman and controlling shareholder of the legendary jewelers Tiffany & Co., he had been kicked out of two prep schools before coasting into Princeton. By his own account, after drinking too much and nearly flunking out there, too, he stumbled upon a class on medieval art and found his passion. He excelled, graduated, and after a stint in the Marine Corps, returned to Princeton for graduate school in art history and archaeology.
As part of his studies, Hoving excavated in Sicily and studied in Rome, where he first met the American antiquities scholar and art dealer Robert Hecht in 1956. Hoving had just earned his PhD from Princeton when his Manhattan social connections got him his job on the bottom rung at the Met in 1959.
For Hoving, Hecht, and von Bothmer, those formative years would be the beginning of the greatest, and possibly most traumatic, adventure of their careers.
During Giacomo’s summer vacations from technical school, he helped his father selling artifacts at Piazza Borghese. He was now selling antiquities in the center of Rome, making connections, meeting rich collectors, and learning the market for the artifacts he already knew so well. The business did well enough that Guido Medici, now a father of six, moved the family back to Rome in 1960. The following year, Giacomo passed his exams and graduated, at age twenty-two, from the technical school with an electrician’s diploma.
But before he could start working in the family business, Medici had to perform his mandatory military service. For most of his year and a half in the Italian army, Medici was based at Bracciano, near Cerveteri, the heart of Etruscan tomb territory. In fact, after his officers learned of Medici’s background in excavation, they put him to work identifying spots for the soldiers to unearth tombs within the vast grounds of the base.
In all, he helped his squad find two or three tombs. But they turned out to be just the burial sites of poorer Etruscans and yielded little more than common buccheri, little black Etruscan pots. These discoveries may not have been much, but they satisfied Medici’s officers enough that they gave him permits to leave the base and allowed him to keep his car near the barracks—and keep up his social life. In 1962, he met a girl named Maria Luisa Renzi at a friend’s party in Monterotondo, the same city where the U.S. troops had taken him after the bombing. Maria Luisa was from Civitavecchia, a port city on the Etruscan coast north of Rome. Her parents owned shops, including tobacco and stationery stores. He was smitten at the sight of her “simple looks and sunny face,” by which he meant she was the marrying type.
While Giacomo Medici’s mind was on romance, the police started paying attention to what was going on at his father’s stall. The elder Medici had sold an Etruscan vase to a law professor of the University of Perugia; when the police later asked the professor where he’d gotten his pot, the law expert fingered his source. The Guardia di Finanza—the finance police—paid a visit to Piazza Borghese in the autumn of 1963 while Giacomo was on duty. When Giacomo and his father failed to provide the Finanza with a legitimate source for some of the clay vessels, prosecutors charged the men with receiving looted antiquities. They went on trial, a process that in Italy can last years due to the sporadic court dates and judges’ overbooked schedules.
As the trial hung over them, Giacomo pulled himself away from his work with his father, and instead tried to build his own business. While his older brother, Roberto, set up his own business selling antique furniture at the Porta Portese bazaar on the other side of the Tiber River, Giacomo stuck to ancient art. The antiquities market was more liquid and the goods were more portable than wardrobes and sideboards.
Through his own work and his father’s connections, Giacomo got to know the network of buyers who would pull the young man from subsistence into affluence. He earned enough that on May 22, 1966, he could marry Maria Luisa at the Church of San Giuseppe in Santa Marinella, a seaside town in the heart of Medici’s Etruscan stomping grounds north of Rome. The following day the newlyweds drove off in Giacomo’s Ford for a two-week honeymoon in Venice and the French Riviera.
Upon his return to Rome, business was so good he became part of the art establishment, helping several wealthy Romans build antiquities collections and getting to know government curators and archaeologists. The biggest fish among Medici’s clients was a pharmaceutical industrialist named Angelo Pesciotti. Pesciotti was free to build his collection because he had an understanding with the culture officials that he would eventually cede his trove to the government’s Villa Giulia Etruscan museum in Rome, which was overseen by Mario Moretti, the government superintendent for all the Etruscan land around Rome. When Pesciotti died on September 13, 1966, his estate began negotiating the sale of most of the collection to the Italian government. As Pesciotti planned, the bulk of it ended up in Villa Giulia, which today has an entire gallery named for him. The man who actually gathered the artifacts, Giacomo Medici, never won such an honor.