Farewell to Annamaria Larese, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Venice

Archaeologist Annamaria Larese, director of the National Archaeological Museum in Venice, which she had led since 2014, passed away in Belluno at the age of sixty-two. Since October she had developed symptoms of a cancer that gave her only a few months to live. Born in Rome to a family originally from Belluno and a graduate in Ancient Letters from Ca’ Foscari University in Venice in 1981 (with a specialization in archaeology in Bologna in 1985), she had begun her career as an archaeologist as an official in the Superintendency of Padua, and was well versed in Veneto archaeology, a great scholar especially of the Concordia Sagittaria area, as well as of ancient glass and terracotta oil lamps. She had a long list of scientific publications to her credit and had also taught at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.

She was also director of the Museo Nazionale Concordiese in Portogruaro-Area Archeologica di Concordia Sagittaria, as well as the Museo della Laguna in Lazzaretto Vecchio and the new Museo di Archeologia del Mare in Caorle, which opened in 2018 and which Larese had helped found: colleagues jokingly called her “the quadruple director.” She was also a member of the Italian National Committee of the Veneto Regional Museums Directorate, an international organization for the study of the history of glass.

“She was an archaeologist over the top,” recalls Daniele Ferrara, regional director of the Veneto Museums. “She knew well that the heritage kept in museums or in the territory needed new forms of mediation; that the interlocutor was the public as a whole and not that of specialists alone. And in fact, as an archaeologist, that is, as a researcher for whom an anthropological approach to the object of research is more inherent, she was aware of the need to make the ancient works, the artifacts, converse with contemporary humanity, trying to make history and its testimonies cross over to an experiential terrain, to those anthropological aspects precisely that would allow the contemporary visitor to recognize himself in the events that involved our ancestors. In this sense he trusted in new technologies, certainly not as a factor of custom that could take over history and its documents.” Numerous, in fact his initiatives to equip museums with tools for dialogue with the public and dissemination of online content.

Currently, he was overseeing the new layout of the Archaeological Museum of Venice, which will now therefore be continued in his name.

Farewell to Annamaria Larese, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Venice

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