Exploring the Antiquity of Man for a New Citizen Model: National Identities and Prehistoric Museums in Sicily in the late 19th century

In Sicily, little scholarly attention was paid to the Prehistoric studies before the midnineteenth century. Discoveries of fossil bones, prehistoric deposits in caves and megalithic monuments were certainly known and had received mention in many studies carried out mostly by foreign scholars. After the Italian unification in 1860, the interest for Sicilian archaeological remains progressed gradually, following similar patterns into the general debate on the national archaeology and its role in terms of national identity. Two lines of enquiry emerged, one closely linked to the emergence of archaeological museums and the other concerned with the idea of a long-term human history from Prehistory to the classical world. In both cases, a new idea of museums has progressed as a model for a new civic message, where some relics of oldest people trace the history of a territory as well as the ancient monuments of the classical world. Therefore, the prehistoric exhibitions became educational and civic examples of a new nation, sharing the political message of the Italian Risorgimento tradition and the cultural heritage of the Enlightenment. This paper aims at reconstructing the role played by the main national archaeological museums at Palermo and Syracuse in a broader cultural framework after the political unification process of Italy. The general idea was to explain the oldest history of Man as a natural phenomenon of transformation, according to the natural sciences and the most advanced reflections on the evolutionist theory. The second aspect deals with the opportunity to organize the Prehistoric collections linked to “Comparative Halls”, containing archaeological material coming from different Mediterranean areas.