From Lecce to La Trobe for the love of pottery
Dr Francesca Silvestrelli
Scholars from Italy are coming to La Trobe University in Melbourne to learn more about ancient pottery found in the southern part of their own country. The latest of these was one of Italy's foremost younger classical scholars, Dr Francesca Silvestrelli, a specialist in the ancient pottery of 'Magna Graecia', the area of the Greek colonies in South Italy and Sicily of the Hellenistic period.
Dr Silvestrelli spent six weeks using the facilities of the University's Trendall Research Centre, particularly its library and photographic archive that is the best of its kind in the world. The Centre is on the top floor of the South wing of Menzies College on the main Melbourne campus at Bundoora, an off-form concrete modernist building designed by Robyn Boyd — surroundings vastly different from the old-word universities where Dr Silvestrelli gained her string of qualifications.
While not widely known to the public, the Trendall Research Centre and its photo archive is a byword for serious students of South Italian and Sicilian pottery of the Classical period. Its collection of ancient Greek pottery includes complete vases and fragments. Some thirty of its finer pieces were lent last year to the Hellenic Foundation, a contribution to the community by the Trendall Centre as part of La Trobe's 40th anniversary celebrations. They are now on display in the Old Mint Building in Melbourne.
Dr Silvestrelli teaches at the University of Lecce. Her undergraduate work was done at the universities of Perugia and Lecce and she received her Masters in Classical Archaeology from Pisa. Her PhD is from the University of Milan.
She has been associated with the Italian and American excavations in and around Metaponto, ancient Metapontion, an important Greek city west of Taranto. Dr Silvestrelli wrote her dissertation on material from the pottery workshops of Metaponto and has published a number of articles on this topic.
While at the Trendall Centre she worked on pottery from recent excavations in the area and gave a seminar on Metapontine pottery for La Trobe's Archaeology Program. The resources of the Trendall Research Centre were built up by one of the world's great classical scholars, the late Arthur Dale Trendall. An authority on painted pottery produced in the Greek colonial cities of South Italy and Sicily during the Classical period, he also had a profound influence on the humanities and Classical studies in Australia for more than half a century.
Born in New Zealand, Professor Trendall studied at Cambridge and was Foundation Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney before moving to the Australian National University in Canberra.
In 1969 he was appointed La Trobe University's first, and only, full-time Resident Fellow where he lived and worked at Menzies College for a quarter of century assembling his library and collection of photographs and artefacts.
The Director of the Trendall Research Centre, Dr Ian McPhee, says the Centre instituted the Trendall Scholarship in 2002 as an important connection between La Trobe and young researchers in Italy.