The Museo Archeologico Guzman di Orbetello on December 19 opened an exhibition called The Landscape of Cosa: The Evolution of the Archaeological Landscape of Cosa and Its Surroundings through Images from the American Academy in Rome. The exhibition, sponsored by the Comune di Orbetello in collaboration with AAR, tells its story using photographs from two important collections in the Academy’s Photographic Archive.
The exhibition primarily draws on photographs from the Cosa Collection taken by former AAR Director Frank E. Brown, who led the Academy’s excavations of the Latin colony of Cosa (Ansedonia) in southwestern Tuscany from 1948 to 1954 and from 1965 to 1982. Those important excavations, continued in the 1990s under the direction of Elizabeth Fentress, AAR’s Mellon Professor-in-Charge from 1996 to 1999, have since become a reference point for the archaeology of Latin colonies and mid-Republican Rome as a whole.
Also featured are photographs from the McCann Collection, which was created by Anna Marguerite McCann (1933–2017), the first American woman underwater archaeologist. A Rome Prize Fellow from 1964 to 1966, McCann participated in the Cosa excavations under Brown. Her images document the underwater and land archaeological excavations from 1965 to 1987 of the ancient harbor of Cosa.
The exhibition is open from December 19 to January 30, excluding Christmas and New Year’s Day, at the Museo Archeologico Guzman di Orbetello, Via Mura di Levante n. 3, Orbetello, Italy.