Le gemme di Aquileia nei documenti dell’amministrazione asburgica. Qualche spunto di ricerca

The institutional context developed in the first decades of the Age of Restoration (ca. 1815-1830) to ensure some safeguard to the ancient monuments of the Austrian “Litorale” is the main deal this paper is concerned with, but special attention is paid to the activity and personality of the public servant Girolamo de Moschettini, who held jurisdiction over Aquileia’s country. Through a systematic exploration of the files in the Archivio di Stato and in the Archivio Storico Comunale of Trieste the author reconstructs the bureaucratic procedures by which ancient gems were selected, raised, then sent to the Cabinet of the Antiquities in Vienna, in which items for the imperial collections met from all the territories of the Habsburg Empire. In the Appendixes I and II reports of some seizures operated in damage of peasants and collectors of Aquileia are transcribed, along with a set of documents concerning the administrative iter of the gems sent to Vienna. Appendix III, finally, summarizes archival data on the provenance of many pieces, as well as the modalities of their acquisition by the Cabinet of the Antiquities in Vienna.