On the chariot of the "Giants", those of Mont 'e Prama, in the extraordinarily archaeological sweet hills of the Sinis, now everyone gets on a little. From ministers on duty to state superintendents, from modest "coachman flies" to unlikely promoters of the museum that is not there. Many, in the name and on behalf of the Giants, are even ready to cross the borders of half the world to consume public money galore. The attempt, very often clumsy, is to claim primates and merits, most of the time undue and unfounded.
Giants & dwarfs
In this history, unique and fascinating, revolutionary and in many ways always opposed, there is a single primacy, that of a civilization, the Sardinian one, which, first in the Mediterranean, has carved, ideally and materially, a unique example of giant nuragic statuary, full of symbolism, like no one else had dared to do before. Mysterious, impressive and exclusive storytelling. Warriors, Boxers, Archers, all symbols imprinted in that stone first carved, then uprooted and, finally, buried by the millennia. Of this story we can tell the past and glorious one, imprinted in an ideal family album of three thousand years ago, and, then, there is the most recent one, made up of announcements, of money promised and never spent, of excavations managed by strokes. of bulldozers and privately negotiated contracts. The last communication "traffic jam" is that of 7 May last.
"Nuntio vobis"
The plethora of hilarious press releases complete with a “nuntio vobis gaudium magnum” -type ad risked clogging up the e-mails of news agencies. The challenge was fought in seconds. The mission was to claim yet another discovery of two remains of "Giants" in the hill between Mari Ermi and the Cabras pond. Over time, the Minister of State, the Minister of Cultural Heritage, Dario Franceschini, won without a competition. Let alone if the number one of the "Dicastery of Pompeii and the Colosseum" could miss the opportunity to praise the new discovery in Sardinia as "exceptional". Moreover, the gentlemen of the Superintendency have taken care not to limit themselves to an exquisitely "technical" announcement of the discovery. As befits the new "political archaeological regime" they have ceded to the Minister, like the subjects to the emperor of Rome, the honor of the news. The flood of comments that followed was a river in flood, a tide of claims, complete with collective exaltation worthy of the conquest, at least on social networks, of Serie A. In this recent chronicle, small and minute in the presence of the greatness of history, the real one, first the announcements are rattled off and then, however, the irrefutable proofs of the facts must be scanned. A story, the one that goes beyond the announcements, that none of the lords of the Palaces would like to be told. The umpteenth head of a Giant, just re-emerged from the lands of the Sinis, turned to the sky like a new ministerial trophy, screeches, and not a little, with the pace of that construction site, of a "Sardinian Pompeii" much declaimed by Rome and Cagliari , how much violated and offended to Cabras. Between the city sunk in the lava of Vesuvius and the one lying on the banks of the Sinis there are not "only" a thousand years of difference, obviously in favor of the archaeological site of the land of the Nuraghi, but also an avalanche of money assigned to the Campania site, in front of of miseries and state alms for the hill of the Giants. When you arrive in Mont 'e Prama, among vineyards and artichokes, a "punch of reality" in the face brings you back to the tsunami of proclamations that not even a month ago flooded the media around the world. You expect a swarm of archaeologists, researchers, explanatory signs, directions on that miraculous hill, where every time you dig you find something. Instead, nothing. The entrance gate is armored. An industrial lock is the most eloquent symbol of this strip of promised, forbidden, seduced and abandoned land. The only sign of presence is a sign, sad as a bill of exchange, hung like a temporary epitaph on an ovoid net, chicken coop style. The fonts are as large as an obituary. The content is illegible, as if the decoding of what is written were to remain buried forever, like the Giants enclosed with impunity under the shamelessly planted vineyard on the right side of the entrance to the Mont 'e Prama shrine. This time the announcement has the holy trappings of bureaucracy. There is a number of Cups, the one that traces the construction site back to a state allocation. Then there are more names of site managers than Giants have been found so far. The sign does not forget a single one: planners, design collaborators, construction manager, scientific direction, operational managers, safety manager, up to the technical director of the company. One reads many names and imagines an infinite construction site, a ten-year excavation campaign, a “Marshall” plan for archeology, desirable given the grandeur and importance of the site. Everyone proclaims its primacy, then, however, the eye falls on figures and dates for a construction site that in words everyone sells as if it were Pompeii, but which, in reality, enjoys the same attention as those of a modest suburban courtyard. And the "damnatio memoriae", the condemnation of memory, resurfaces heavily on the threshold of the twenty-second summer of the third millennium in the hills of the "Kolossos." The document we publish is the exact photograph of what happens in that quadrilateral of the Confraternity of the Rosary of Cabras. The contract, in fact a direct negotiation, with the specification of urgency, is entrusted, for the umpteenth time, to a company that arrives from none other than Castiglione Cosentino, Calabria, to dig in Mont 'e Prama. invited to this sort of competition, two are Sardinians. One, that of Cagliari, does not participate, the other, that of Seulo, loses. Mr. Mariano Mirabelli from Cosenza wins, with a reduction of 25.77%. comes from the heel of the boot, but to the travel expenses it even adds a "discount" of a quarter of the value of the tender specifications. One, at that point, imagines that the amount is worth it. Not even for a dream. excavation campaign, that propagates ndated by the ministry as a new mission to space, it is worth just 43,500 euros. A pittance, a state alms, in the presence of the latest announcement made by the government for Pompeii: contract for new excavations for the beauty of 157 million, yes, millions, of euros. To spend this "emergency" appropriation for Mont 'e Prama, the ministerial bandwagon has committed the beauty of almost a year: the commitment of expenditure for the work to be performed, "without fail", where everyone knew that to discover new finds c 'was only to be excavated, it was approved on 7 July 2021. It was necessary to wait until 22 March to entrust the work. Six days ago, on May 31, again according to the disposable sign posted at the entrance to the construction site, the works would be finished. In reality, even yesterday, with the gate barred and the deserted area, the white and light blue sheets were always stretched over the latest findings.
"Announced" excavations
The circumscribed area of the new excavation, less than 50 square meters, for the first time comes out of that enclosure on which for years we have witnessed exciting excavations and frontal clashes between the Universities of Sassari and Cagliari and the ministry for governance of the site . There were the archaeologists of the universities, then expelled, to make room for the Emilian cooperatives first and for the Calabrian companies later. We went from trowel and brush to bulldozers rummaging through the finds. One thing is certain: everyone knew that there, in that area, not only were those finds, but, according to the data of the georadar used for the first time in 2014 by Professor Gaetano Ranieri and archaeologist Momo Zucca, in that site there is much more. Excavations, therefore, "without fail", perfectly in geometric axis, among other things, with the discoveries of the seventies made by Giovanni Lilliu and Alessandro Bedini. Finds scattered everywhere, even under the vineyards. This, however, is another story, of expropriation and business.
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