In this panel, a writer, archaeologist, and historian will discuss how, at the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Rome became a center of archaeological research, began a campaign for modernization, and fostered a nascent women’s movement in Italy. From the 1870s, post-Risorgimento Rome was transformed into a capital city, at once ancient and modern.

Rome was home to dozens of foreign academies for scholars studying, drawing, and learning from the ancient world; the first female research fellow of the American School of Classical Studies arrived in 1901. In Rome in 1901, the Federazione delle Opere di Attività femminile was founded, later becoming the Consiglio Nazionale delle Donne Italiane. In 1908, the city hosted Congresso nazionale delle donne italiane, the first congress of Italian women where participants strongly advocated for the women’s right to vote. Women joined men in the intellectual activities of research and analysis of ancient Rome and took up cultural causes for the preservation of archaeological sites and minor architecture in the area around Rome.

The increasing availability of photography played an important role. As the Academy’s exhibition Women and Ruins makes clear, women found, through the lens of the camera, an expressive medium to document not only the landscape of excavating the past but the panorama of a new future.

The speakers include:

• Maria Grazia Turco, Department of History, Representation, and Restoration of Architecture, Sapienza University of Rome
• Caroline Goodson, Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor, American Academy in Rome
• Selby Lynn Schwartz, writer and the 2025 Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow in Literature

This event will take place in Italian.

On this same evening, the exhibition Women and Ruins: Archaeology, Photography, and Landscape opens at 6:00pm.