The statues were discovered in San Casciano dei Bagni, a hilltop town in the province of Siena, about 100 miles north of Rome, where archaeologists have been exploring the muddy ruins of an ancient bathhouse since 2019. .
What do the statues mean?
“It is a very significant and extraordinary find,” Jacopo Tabolli, an assistant professor at the University for Foreigners of Siena who heads the archaeological project, told Reuters on Tuesday.
Tabolli said the statues, representing Hygieia, Apollo and other Greco-Roman divinities, used to grace a sanctuary before being submerged in hot springs, in some sort of ritual, “probably around the first century AD.”
“You give something to the water because you expect the water to give you something back,” he said of the ritual.
Most of the statues date from the 2nd century B.C. C. and the first century AD. C., a period of “great transformation in ancient Tuscany” when it passed from Etruscan to Roman rule, the Italian Ministry of Culture said in a statement.
The statues were covered in nearly 6,000 bronze, silver and gold coins, and the hot, muddy waters of San Casciano helped preserve them “almost like the day they were submerged,” Tabolli said.
The researcher, an expert in etruscology and Italic archaeology, said his team recovered 24 large statues, plus several smaller figurines, noting that it was unusual that they were made of bronze rather than terracotta.
Tabolli said this suggested they came from what he called an elite settlement, where archaeologists also found “marvelous Etruscan and Latin inscriptions” mentioning the names of powerful local families, the ministry statement added.