Bassilla whispers the eternity of ancient Aquileia

Outside, the song of cicadas makes the sunset pale and absorbed, and strong is the salty smell of the Adriatic, not far away. Here, on the first floor of the National Archaeological Museum of Aquileia, voices whisper history and stories, from tombstones and stelae, statues and jewellery: they are a crowded forum, a harbour quay laden with goods and men, or a domus in which to pray to Lari, Mani and Penati.

We are in southern Friuli, where in 181 B.C. Rome sent three thousand foot soldiers and an unknown number of Samnite centurions and horsemen from Latium and Molise to found the colony as an outpost against the Gauls and Histri who threatened the eastern borders: the magistrates Publius Cornelius Scipio, Gaius Flaminius and Lucius Manlius Acidinus, depicted in a relief from the 1st century BC, attend the foundation and the pomerium, the furrow left by the plough pulled by an ox and a cow, marks the sacred and impassable perimeter of the city.

All these voices speak to us, all these gazes, which we watch, look at us. There is also a mima, her name is Bassilla, elegant in her tunic and hairstyle. Her eyes stare at us, asking us to stop, and the funerary stele, found in a necropolis in the southern part of the city and datable to the 2nd century A.D., with its Greek inscription does the rest to tell us about the fame of Bassilla, tenth Musa, and the greatness of multi-ethnic and powerful Aquileia. The stele is dedicated by the actor Heraclides, a colleague or perhaps the man who loved her: "To her who in the past, in many lands and in many cities, reaped success on the stage resounding with applause for her versatile talent, manifested in mime and dance, to her who often died on the stage, but not in this way, to the tenth Muse Bassilla, Heraclides, an actor skilled in declamation, placed this stele. Even in death she was accorded an honour equal to that which she enjoyed in life, for her body rests in ground sacred to the Muses. Your colleagues say to you: 'Be of good cheer, Bassilla, no one is immortal'". And, instead, it was precisely this dedication in Greek that made the actress and her art eternal, remembering also her non-Latin origin. Because people came and went from Aquileia, mingling, exchanging products, ideas, languages and cults, from Belenus to Mithras to Christianity. The city became the gateway to the Mediterranean, as the section of the museum collection where the Bassilla stele is located is also called. It is precisely the recent rearrangement of the archaeological museum that enhances the infinite faces of the ancient city, because the old exhibition criterion based on the typological classification of artefacts has been abandoned in favour of a narrative, the flow of faces, events and constructions. Each object, presented in its own sphere of use, narrates an aspect of life, and so the Museum is an alternation of history and stories, which also involves the choice of colour for the layout of the rooms, a very light green that is earth, sky and sea together.

Aquileia, thanks to the many routes that passed through it, Postumia and Iulia Augusta above all, is on the borders of the empire and in the heart of Noricum (present-day Austria), Pannonia, Istria and Dalmatia. It was a globalised emporium between the Mediterranean, Alpine and Balkan regions and functioned as a redistribution centre for raw materials, foodstuffs and handicraft and artistic artefacts, hides and slaves. Goods also travelled thanks to the connection with the sea via the Natiso cum Turro river (today Natisone and Torre), which in ancient times flowed not far from Grado, and the Anfora canal, dug in the 2nd century BC.

The wealth is evident, as Ausonius also writes (Ordo Urbium Nobilium, 9): '...since a recent glory has made you great, you will be numbered ninth among the illustrious cities, O Aquileia, an Italic colony, facing the mountains of Illyria, most famous for your walls and your port'. And as dozens and dozens of artefacts in the Museum testify, from the golden flies, discovered in a female burial outfit from the 1st-2nd century A.D, to the treasure trove of gems, ambers and coins on the second floor, which is also the pride of director Marta Novello: "Strolling through the rooms of the 18th-century villa, which has housed the Museum since 1882, or in the shade of the porticoes surrounding the garden, one breathes the air of a cosmopolitan city, which was a place of encounter and exchange of knowledge and cultures, to the mingling of which extraordinary artefacts bear witness, such as the mosaic in minute coloured tesserae depicting two vine branches tied with a bow, a distant suggestion of the Greek and oriental worlds, or the thousands of shades of colour of the glass containers...". In order to better explain this wealth, the director takes us to the newly opened storerooms, six rooms covering 500 square metres set up with inscriptions, votive and funerary altars, sculptures in the round and sculptures in relief, ceramic, glass and bone artefacts with pull-out drawers and other objects. There are cascades of antiquities before our eyes, and the light and symmetrical order do the rest.