Matteo Geronimo Mazza: a recovered sylloge by a Renaissance antiquarian and collector

This article restores to us one of the manuscript collections of inscriptions compiled at the turn of the sixteenth century by Matteo Geronimo Mazza, a jurist, politician and scholar from Salerno. A prominent figure in Renaissance antiquarianism, Mazza compiled several epigraphic sylloges, which, together with his own collection of inscribed marbles, remained after his death in the villa he had built in Marechiaro at the edge of the bay of Naples, among the ruins of a Roman Temple of Fortune and the ancient villa of Vedius Pollio. Most of Mazza’s manuscripts have long been considered lost. In the mid-nineteenth century, when Theodor Mommsen was compiling volume X of the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, he searched unsuccessfully for Mazza’s sylloges, eventually making do instead with a set of eighteenth-century copies, which he found in the archives of Ludovico Muratori in Modena. One of Mazza’s manuscripts, however, had come into the hands of Sir William Hamilton, who, in 1801, donated it to the Society of Antiquaries in London. The recovery of this single epigraphic sylloge provides us with new information not only on Mazza himself but relating to inscriptions, monumental sites and sixteenth-century collections in southern Italy. The article also retraces the external history of the manuscript and the routes by which it left Naples for London, thereby revealing the dense network of eighteenth-century antiquarians who actively studied and copied materials preserved in Mazza’s villa, and shedding new light on some of his other sylloges, which are still lost. All these findings are additionally presented in tabular form at the end of the article in a series of Appendices, supplemented by Indices which group and distill the inscriptions themselves.