ANDREA CARANDINI

Original Article
History of the Human Sciences

1–27
Psychoanalysis and ª The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0952695120980592
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Carandini, the ruins

of Rome, and the writing
of history
Tom McCaskie
University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract
Freud’s fascination with the ruins of ancient Rome was an element in the formation and
development of psychology. This article concerns the intersection of psychoanalysis with
archaeology and history in the study of that city. Its substantive content is an analysis of
the life and career of Andrea Carandini, the best-known Roman archaeologist of the past
40 years. He has said and written much about his changing views of himself and about
what he is trying to do in his approach to the recuperation of the Roman past. His
scholarly publications and autobiographical testimonies are at the core of this article.
After an early commitment to Marxism that ended in disenchantment and a crisis in his
personal life, Carandini spent a decade undergoing psychoanalysis with the Chilean-born
expatriate Ignacio Matte-Blanco. The latter gained a following as a theorist who built
upon Freud’s ideas about the unconscious by producing a set of mathematically inspired
concepts concerning the workings of temporality in human history in which emotional
intuition took priority over the rational(izing) logic of empiricism. Much influenced by his
psychoanalyst, Carandini developed a highly personal approach to the writing of
archaeology and history. These writings are explored here in terms of Roman histor-
iography, and in the wider arena of formulations of how the past is to be addressed and
written about.
Corresponding author:
Tom McCaskie, University of Birmingham, Department of African Studies and Anthropology, Edgbaston,
Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK.
Email: tommccaskie@aol.com
2 History of the Human Sciences XX(X)
Keywords
ancient Rome, archaeology, Carandini, Freud, Matte-Blanco
When the clay-colored hand

turned to clay and the eyes’ small lids fell shut,
filled with rugged walls, crowded with castles,
and when man lay all tangled in his hole,
there remained an upturned exactitude:
the high site of the human dawn:
the highest vessel that held silence in:
a life of stone after so many lives.1
Introductory remarks
In a trenchant intervention, the distinguished feminist scholar Joan Scott has surveyed
the notably diverse and evolving complexities of relations between history and psycho-
analysis. Noting that historians and psychoanalysts have different conceptions of time
and causality, she goes on to argue that this very incommensurability can in and of itself
be productive. Psychoanalysis, she urges, forces historians to interrogate their conven-
tional wisdom about facts, narrative, and cause, and opens windows into ‘disturbing
notions about unconscious motivation and the effects of fantasy on the making of
history’ (Scott, 2012: 63). Scott is hardly alone, for the possibilities and perils of the
‘experimental entanglements’ between many disciplines, psychoanalysis and history
included, is a burgeoning feature of much academic discourse in the aftermath of the
linguistic and cultural turns (Alexander and Taylor, 2012; Callard and Fitzgerald, 2015).
Symptomatic of this has been a recent autobiographical turn in the writings of historians,
and the palpable ‘desire for the past’ that this addresses and discusses has inflected
theoretical and empirical practice (Aurell, 2012, 2015; Chorell, 2015). The broad pur-
pose of this article is to consider an instance of a hitherto neglected but important aspect
of such developments and initiatives. In substance what follows is a reading in close
biographical detail of the life and work of a famously prolific archaeologist and historian
who has undergone psychoanalysis, and who has written about the huge impact of that
decade-long experience on his later life, thought, and scholarship. The aim is to employ
this exploration to cast light upon some contemporary issues in the human sciences, and
most importantly on ongoing debates about the quiddity and role of the subjective in
interpreting and shaping historical and other types of knowledge.
Rome, Freud, and Carandini

It is well understood that Freud made recurring if often equivocal use of the emerging
science of archaeology as a metaphorical analogy for the strategies and aims of psycho-
analysis. Both disciplines sought to uncover the quiddities of the past, to read them into
McCaskie 3
the present, and to project them into the future. Both were enmeshed in an unstable
dialectic of concealment and revelation, and both strove to weave narrative sense from
inferences about absences and presences. For Freud working with individuals, as for
archaeologists in their readings of historic cultures, the interpretation of the past from
traces and memories was an act of recuperation but also of metamorphosis. Such a
procedure can and does produce narratological fictions, but these are often ‘(hi)stories’
that have a potent and persuasive validity in the present. It is similarly well understood
that Freud arrived at the oracular conclusion that civilization itself was a self-consuming
artefact, just like the individual mind prone to a fading away brought about from within.
Famously, Freud situated a model for this process in the ruins of ancient Rome, and
there is a large and variegated literature on many aspects of this topic (e.g. Armstrong,
2005; Barker, 1996; Brunner, 2011; Jacobus, 2018; Masson, 1985; Oliensis, 2009;
Phillips, 2014; Simmons, 2006; Stok, 2011; Tögel, 2002). Freud’s prolonged phobia
about actually visiting Rome is documented in his letters to Fliess and others, as are his
efforts to locate a rationale for this avoidance variously in his relations with his father, in
the classical scholarship of his father-in-law, in the rabbinical exegeses of his
grandfather-in-law, in his own cultural heritage, in his unease at the oppressively anti-
Semitic atmosphere of Catholic Habsburg Vienna, and so forth (Momigliano, 1969;
Roudinesco, 2014). Eventually he did travel to Rome after placing his personal reserva-
tions and his habitual evolutionary pessimism about civilization in a nervous and tem-
porary abeyance.
Three observations about Freud and Rome are relevant to what follows. First, his
attempts to interrogate the nature and identity of the Roman past were framed and to a
perceptible degree parsed by his readings in the English-language volumes of Rodolfo
Lanciani (1845–1929), pioneer of the modern archaeological and topographical study of
the ancient city (Lanciani, 1888, 1893, 1897, 1899, 1910). Like Lanciani, Freud was
sensitive, if at times melodramatic, in his desire to resurrect past lives from the pathos of
present remains (Lanciani, 1890; Palombi, 2006). Second, Freud’s abiding fascination
with Roman civilization became a componential thread in the development of the psy-
choanalytic project, and markedly so in the cases of Jung and later Lacan (Koelb, 2015).
Third, and despite hesitations and disclaimers, Freud’s arresting portrait of the Roman
past as an atemporal simultaneity of buildings reduced to ruins and remains continues to
enjoy a vividly enduring resonance (Freud, 1930, 2002).
This article takes its cue from the foregoing. It deals with the now historic but still
ongoing conversation between Freudian psychoanalysis and archaeological practice in
the context of ancient Rome. It is focused around the person, writings, and opinions of
Andrea Carandini (born 1937), the most productive, the most engagé, and certainly the
best-known (to both scholars and the general public) archaeological excavator of Rome
over the past 40 years. Carandini, as will be seen, is a most beguiling figure, a composite
of scientific intellect and philosophical intuition, someone who has thought, said, and
published a great deal about himself in relation to these two oscillating antinomies in his
life and work. Whatever one thinks of Carandini, he sets himself against norms prevail-
ing in the academy by overtly inserting himself into his scholarship in ways that can be at
once candid, calculated, combative, and controversial, but also revelatory of something
of the self that stands behind the prose.
Unsurprisingly, that sense of self has shifted and evolved over the decades so that
reading Carandini’s oeuvre and obiter dicta gives access to a telling autobiographical
commentary on what he thinks he is about as well as what he does. One result of this is
that he is ‘good to think with’ (bon à penser) in the Lévi-Straussian sense, and not least
because his views can be caustic and provocative as if designed to call forth dissenting
responses. Carandini’s promiscuous and frequently unguarded verbal barrage, in his
books, articles, appearances in the media, and the rest, has literally made this essay
possible. He is the connective tissue in what follows, and the text is articulated around
his life, career, opinions, and interventions. Carandini has observed that the decade or so
that he spent in psychoanalysis when he was in his forties was a turning point in his life
and a revelatory clarification of it. Thus the (hi)story that follows here is a matter of
public record authored and hence authorized by the subject himself, an internationally
renowned scholar and intellectual in Italy, Europe, and beyond.
Carandini’s family and formation

Andrea Carandini has an aristocratic background with strong ties to modern Italy’s
liberal and leftist intelligentsia. He was a descendant of the Carandini of Modena, created
counts after the epochal battle of Lepanto against the Ottomans in 1571. The title of
Marchese of Sarzano was later added (Messori, 1997).
Andrea’s father was Count Nicolò Carandini (1896–1972). Liberal by background
and personal inclination, he withdrew from public life during the fascist era. In 1943 he
took part in the refounding of the secular Liberal Party, and in the following year the new
government in liberated Rome sent him to London as Italian ambassador, a post he
retained until 1947. Back home he involved himself in more left-leaning liberal politics,
helping to found the tiny Radical Party before he retired in 1962. His wife, and the
mother of their five children (Andrea being the second oldest), was Elena Albertini
(1902–90). Her father, Luigi Albertini, was one of the best-known public intellectuals
of his time. A lawyer by training, he emerged as the champion of a centrist liberalism that
rejected the extremes of both fascism and socialism. He became an influential national
voice as editor of the Corriere della Sera newspaper until Mussolini forced his retire-
ment in 1925.
Thereafter, until his death in 1941, Luigi Albertini lived in retreat with family mem-
bers, including Elena, his son-in-law Nicolò, and their growing family, at his agricultural
estate at Torre in Pietra near Rome. In enforced retirement he wrote an incisive and
widely praised three-volume account of the causes and origins of the First World War.
This was published in Italian shortly after his death, was later translated into English and
other languages, and has never been out of print since. Simultaneously, Elena kept
compendious if discontinuous diaries about the trials and rewards of daily life with
reflections about the iniquities of fascism and her hopes for the revival of a liberal Italy.
Later some of these were also published (Albertini, 1942–3, 1950; Bartoli, 2007; Brié,
1972; E. A. Carandini, 1989, 1997, 2007, 2015; Riccardi, 1993).
It is beyond my remit here to speculate about relations between Andrea Carandini and
his family. However, his numerous passing remarks on this subject over the years merit
comment. Thus, in reviewing his past life the adult Carandini barely mentions his mother
McCaskie 5
(or indeed his two wives). His famous maternal grandfather died when he was a small
child, but Carandini now lives in the Albertini house in Rome and reportedly takes pride
in showing visitors objects and mementoes there that in his view belong to the history of
20th-century Italy. However, throughout Carandini’s reminiscences it is his father
Nicolò who emerges as the most vivid, if vexingly ambiguous, even opaque, presence.
Under the influence of his own experience of psychoanalysis, Carandini has postulated
connections between recurring dreams, first manifested when he was at school in Lon-
don, an absence or remoteness in his father, the ambassador, and his own later decision to
become an archaeologist.
In one of these dreams Carandini is going to meet his father at Claridge’s Hotel in
London. The hotel is empty and he anxiously searches for his father. At last he comes
upon him in a salon, where Nicolò is lunching with royal but unidentified personages.
His father looks away and the son becomes afraid and does not know what to do. He
looks outside through a window and sees an excavated Roman theatre. In another dream
Carandini is nine years old (so, 1946), alone and feeling his way down a dark staircase in
the London Underground. He cannot find any route back to the surface and continues to
descend until he comes upon a small door. He opens it and sees before him a cemetery
with men digging in it. They unearth women who remove jewels from their arms and
necks but are otherwise paralysed. Carandini is on record as saying that he had not
thought about the symbolic or predictive value of these dreams until he reached univer-
sity and was pointed to his destiny as an archaeologist by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli
(1900–75), patently cast in this context as another father figure. The father figure has had
something of a chequered history in psychoanalytical thinking, but if we combine Nicolò
and Bianchi Bandinelli with Carandini’s subsequent devotion to his psychoanalyst and
his writings about Romulus and Augustus, ‘fathers’ of Rome in different eras, then a
visibly insistent thread of continuity is apparent (Gnoli, 2015; Trowell and Etchegoyen,
2002).
Carandini, Bianchi Bandinelli, and Marxism

The film L’uomo che non cambiò la storia (The Man Who Didn’t Change History) was
shown out of competition at the Venice Film Festival in 2017. Directed by Enrico Caria,
this documentary was an account of Hitler’s visit to Mussolini in Rome in May 1938.
The script was adapted from the diaries of Bianchi Bandinelli, published after the war.
Son of a Sienese nobleman and his aristocratic German wife, Bianchi Bandinelli was
bilingual. He studied archaeology at the University of Rome and then worked on the
ancient Etruscan settlements of Clusium (Chiusi) and Suana (Sovana) close to his home.
He taught at Italian universities and at Groningen, and in 1935 he co-founded Critica
d’Arte. This journal invited a wide range of scholarship, but it underlined the ways in
which Italian archaeology was a child of art history, aesthetics, and connoisseurship.
Indeed, during the war Bianchi Bandinelli went on to publish the influential Storicità
dell’arte classica (1943).
Like many members of his social class, Bianchi Bandinelli was a man whose faith in
the inherited if paternalistic liberalism of his landowning family was shattered by the rise
of fascism. However, his ethical travails remained private and were committed only to
his diary (Barbanera, 2003; Barzanti, 1994; Bianchi Bandinelli, 1996). His detestation of
Mussolini and all he stood for was certainly political, but it was also rooted in an
aesthetic disdain, a distaste tinged with the self-conscious despair that he and the social
class to which he belonged were now on the verge of historical redundancy. Notwith-
standing, Bianchi Bandinelli’s social, linguistic, and academic skills recommended him
to Mussolini’s advisers as the ideal cicerone to conduct Hitler around the historic sites
(and sights) of Rome. It was only in a very different political environment after the war
that Bianchi Bandinelli, by then a committed leftist, wrote a mock-heroic but still
enraged and disgusted picaresque about his time as Hitler’s guide (Bianchi Bandinelli,
1995). He reflected that in 1938, clad in regulation fascist blackshirt and fez, and
carrying a pistol, he might have changed history simply by shooting Il Duce and Der
Führer, but he honestly admitted that he had lacked the nerve (hence the title of Caria’s
film).
During 1943 the Italian Communist Party (PCI), banned by Mussolini since 1926, was
revived and reconfigured. It distanced itself from Moscow’s directives, most notably by
deciding to offer candidates for parliamentary elections. Bianchi Bandinelli finally
elected to embrace a public political commitment by joining it in 1944. Once the war
was over, his burgeoning academic reputation, and widely known sardonic moral integ-
rity in the face of fascism and its pressures, meant that he survived the post-war purge of
university personnel and was appointed the director of the new Ministry of Antiquities
and Fine Arts (Flamigni, 2013, 2014). Moving to a professorial chair in art history and
archaeology at La Sapienza in Rome, he became over time a barone, an academic with
significant informal reach and influence over academic appointments and policies. At its
corrupt worst the workings of this widespread and well-known phenomenon have been
compared to those of the mafia, but even its fiercest critics concede that in some cases
leading-edge research can emerge from a system that bypasses the Byzantine bureau-
cracy of the Italian state (Guerra, 2019; Herzfeld, 2009).
In Italy today, as in other Western European countries, the young tend to see the
immediately post-war decades as a time of confident advance with a plethora of now
vanished job opportunities (Pintucci and Cella, 2014). This nostalgia, if that is what it is,
is certainly current in universities. Without secure jobs or research funding, younger
Italian scholars have taken to the library shelves to excavate the historiographies of their
own disciplines, including the ideas and projects of the aspirant barone Bianchi Bandi-
nelli (see Cella, Gori, and Pintucci, 2016; Dyson, 2019, for a wider institutional portrait).
Bianchi Bandinelli was an aristocrat, dedicated to the rarefied practice of traditional art
history, and, like many intellectuals after the war, fearful that Europe’s cultural heritage
would be by-passed by the American and Russian monoliths. Accordingly, he was the
founding editor-in-chief of the initial seven volumes of the renowned Enciclopedia
dell’arte antica, classica e orientale (1958–66). His principal assistant recalled that
Bianchi Bandinelli was immensely hard-working, a singular individual of enormous
ability who led from the front, and a man given to a concentrated meditative opacity
that only served to magnify his charisma (Andreotti and de Melis, 2005).
However, Bianchi Bandinelli was also a committed leftist, convinced that Italian
archaeology had to break free from its art historical roots and embrace the illumination
cast by Marxist materialism and Gramscian cultural theory on the lives of people in the
McCaskie 7
past. This concern came decisively to the forefront in the early 1960s. In 1962 Massimo
Pallottino (1909–95), a pioneer of serious archaeological investigation of the Etruscans,
used the pages of the journal Archeologia Classica to call for the forging of a unity of
purpose among students of the classical past. Conservative and religious, Pallottino
feared the rise in open tensions between Marxists and others. Intensive dialogue pro-
duced the Società degli Archeologi Italiani (SAI), but dispute persisted. In 1967 younger
leftists within the SAI defected to form a group of ‘friends’ (amici) who founded the
journal Dialoghi di Archeologia. The only senior scholar involved in this was Bianchi
Bandinelli. He provided financial support and agreed to become institutional figurehead
as the director of the new journal (Iacono, 2014).
Marxist in orientation and radically opposed to Crocean idealism, the new journal was
a self-consciously collective enterprise that encouraged both methodological innovation
in research and interdisciplinary debate. The amici, effectively a collective editorial
group very much in tune with the political currents of universities in the later 1960s,
were born mostly in the 1930s and 1940s. Influenced by scholars like the leftist British
archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, and eager to absorb ideas and approaches from emer-
ging Anglo-American ‘new’ archaeology, the amici came to count among their number
some future scholars of distinction (Giudi, 2014; Vittoria, 2014). Four figures stand out
from among the amici as recognizably charismatic scholars, activists, enablers, networ-
kers, and future baroni. Two of these, Mario Torelli and Filippo Coarelli, are not of
immediate concern here. Of the remaining two, the prehistorian Renato Peroni (1930–
2010) was a dedicated innovator in the direction and methodology of both archaeology
and anthropology, although he was often at odds with some of his peers as well as with
his elders (Peroni, 1959, 1980, 1982, 1994, 1996; Puglisi, 1959).
The fourth outstanding figure was the archaeologist Andrea Carandini, seven years
younger than Peroni, and one of Bianchi Bandinelli’s research students. He arrived at La
Sapienza planning to study classical philology with Ettore Paratore. Instead he encoun-
tered Bianchi Bandinelli, who proved to be complex, fascinating, and inspiring. Caran-
dini thought ‘the red count’ seductive in the very complexity of his antinomies. He
seemed to be tormented by unresolved contradictions between his aristocratic origins
and his progressive views, a characteristic that the younger man recognized in himself.
With hindsight Carandini compared his mentor to Thomas Mann in his ambivalence
between his perceptions of the clear value of the past and the equally clear necessity of a
new social order. This was a sombre view that Carandini identified in all of those who
might have served as surrogate father figures, and it was a view that hardened as the
years passed. In old age he confessed that he felt like an archaeological relic himself
because he was forged by a world, a class, and an outlook that no longer existed (Gnoli,
2015).
Carandini’s early work and career

Carandini was hooked, and he wrote his thesis on the mosaics of the Casale villa at
Piazza Armerina under Bianchi Bandinelli’s supervision. Later he noted that this study
was as much art history as archaeology, but that it made him more aware of and familiar
with the latter discipline. Further work with others ensued, and eventually a full account
was published (Carandini, Ricci, and de Vos, 1982). Carandini began his academic
career as an assistant professor at La Sapienza. Between 1971 and 1983 he was a
professor of classical art and archaeology at the University of Siena, and held an analo-
gous post at the University of Pisa from 1983 until 1992. Then, from 1992 until he retired
in 2010, he was back at La Sapienza as professor of classical archaeology and art history.
There in Rome, at the largest university in Italy and at the heart of the politics of the
academic system, he taught the methods and techniques of archaeological excavation to
successive cohorts of students and wrote and published prolifically (Capanna and
d’Alessio, 2008).
Following significant archaeological work at Rome’s port of Ostia and at Carthage in
Tunisia, Carandini made his academic reputation through the sustained excavation of a
single site, most intensively, between 1975 and 1981 (Wickham, 1988). He headed an
international team in terms of both personnel and funding. He brought up-to-date sci-
entific methods to his project and exercised rigorous control over the excavation process.
The site was a large Roman villa at Settefinestre near Cosa in southern Tuscany that had
flourished between the first century BCE and the third century CE. Unlike Roman
aristocratic houses or Neapolitan luxury retreats, the Settefinestre villa had been a centre
of agribusiness. Excavations revealed that in its first incarnation it had produced wine,
perhaps linked to the export from Cosa to Gaul of Sestius amphorae. The villa’s pro-
duction seemed to have peaked at the time of Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE), but in the
second century CE its business had shifted to include intensive pig rearing. However,
success had not been sustained and hence the villa had been abandoned circa 250 CE.
Roman agriculture on this scale was based on slave labour, and mode and means of
production as topics fitted with the Marxist orientation of Carandini and some of his
fellow amici. In addition, the architecture and layout of the villa itself suggested it might
have taken planning inspiration from the ideal type described in the writings of Varro.
This had been a working country house but one that had been quite notably decorated,
and so Carandini and his team were able to make arguments about parallels with and
borrowings from a variety of Roman building work, and to make an attempt to fit
Settefinestre into what was known about the evolution of style and taste.
Settefinestre was a massive and demanding project. An interim report on the excava-
tions was produced in 1980 (Carandini and Tatton-Brown, 1980), and the main site
report followed five years later. This was a multivolume production, sumptuously
printed and lavishly illustrated. Its technical rigour, acuity, and bulk were all testamen-
tary declarations about a definitive coming of age in modern techniques of scientific
investigation by Italian archaeologists who were influenced by their British counterparts.
Nearly 50 academics from Italy and elsewhere, drawn from a range of relevant disci-
plines, contributed chapters to the three volumes (A. Carandini, 1985). Some went on to
conduct further research at Settefinestre, across Etruria, and beyond, advancing their
own reputations and careers as the years passed. Most germanely, the Settefinestre
project gave Carandini a leading role in Roman archaeology, and he assumed the mantle
of barone. It was very much his project, and it conferred upon him a sense of entitled
ownership together with access to the disbursive powers of academic patronage and
influence.
McCaskie 9
In the aftermath of Carandini’s landmark excavations, survey work was extended to

the Albegna valley, adjacent coastal areas, and the three Roman colonies of Cosa, Heba,
and Saturnia, to situate Settefinestre in its wider context (Attolini, Cambi, and Celuzza,
1982). However, the dispersal of the field team, and the loss of some records and maps,
meant that these additional findings were published only in part and many years after the
project (Carandini and Cambi, 2002). This volume was for the most part received
respectfully, but Andrew Wilson, the newly created professor of the archaeology of the
Roman empire at Oxford, pointed out its oddities and defects in a lengthy review
(Wilson, 2004; Woolf, 2004). He noted that the volume was edited by Carandini and
his associate Cambi, but also ‘with’ Celuzza and Fentress. This, he said, had come as a
surprise to the latter two authors, both of them women, ‘whose unrevised texts were used
without their knowledge or, indeed, approval’. In general terms the book was incom-
plete, offering no definitive catalogue of the finds, and while it contained many sugges-
tive data, none was fully contextualized and analysed. Wilson added that the volume
opened with ‘an extraordinary introduction’ by Carandini, written in an ‘idiosyncratic
tone’ and with ‘ad hominem attacks on his collaborators’. He concluded that all this said
more about Carandini himself than about his ‘targets’ (Wilson, 2004: 569). In fact, by
then, and by his own admission, Carandini had changed as a person. It is time now to
look into the causes and consequences of this transformation.
National and personal disorientation

When the lens is widened, it can be seen that the entire Settefinestre project took place
across the time that Italians term the violent anni di piombo or ‘years of lead’ and then
the corrupt anni di fangi (‘years of mud’) of the 1970s and 1980s (Bull and Giorgio,
2005; Ginsborg, 2003; Magri, 2012; Montanelli and Cervi, 2012, 2018; Piccolo, 2013).
This was a period in which both state and society in Italy suffered debilitating incoher-
ence from a fragmentation marked by extremes of right- and left-wing violence, and by
the visible proliferation of kleptocracy and conspiracy theories. Most pertinently, the
PCI entered a time of crisis. After the killing of Allende in Chile in 1973, PCI national
secretary Enrico Berlinguer came to believe that a distancing from Moscow and some
sort of a ‘historical compromise’ with the ruling Christian Democrats (DC) were the
necessary preconditions for his party to be permitted to participate in government. This
compromesso istorico was set out in 1976. The PCI proposed an alliance with the DC,
but the latter refused this overture, and this split the PCI membership. Uncompromising
elements distanced themselves from the party and took to violence, sometimes condoned
by the disoriented and confused mass membership. Significantly, terrorists were eva-
sively referred to as being i compagni che sbaglioni (‘the comrades who make mistakes’)
by their more peaceful peers.
Bianchi Bandinelli died in 1975. Carandini felt this as a personal loss rather than a
political one. Simply, an exemplary guide, mentor, and fatherly presence had disap-
peared. Thirty-five years later, in different circumstances, Carandini made careful dis-
tinctions between himself and the man who had made him into an archaeologist. Both
were aristocrats, but while Bianchi Bandinelli had been guiltily tortured about his rank
and status, Carandini denied any conferred advantage and thought he was a man who had
simply taken the chances that had come his way. He opined that Bianchi Bandinelli had
thought of communism as a secular faith, ‘a new Christianity’, but to his pupil it had
always been just a mechanism for moving towards a more equitable society. By the time
he said this, Carandini had long since experienced a ‘disappointment’ with Marxism and
had made a conscious ‘renunciation’ of it (Gnoli, 2015).
Indeed, by the early 1980s the world of Italian communism and the PCI was riven,
fractured, uncertain, and much weakened in its ideological appeal. In the worlds of the
academy and archaeology the Dialoghi di Archeologia had lost whatever cutting edge it
might once have had. With its presiding spirit Bianchi Bandinelli now gone, it staggered
on through two relaunches in 1979 and again in 1983 before ceasing publication alto-
gether in 1992. In its heyday it had been a forum in which those united around a leftist,
materialist approach to archaeology might find support and stimulation. This mood and
its aspirations underwrote the project on slave agriculture at Settefinestre, and it enabled
Carandini to import and foster scientific archaeological techniques and practices. In
1981 Carandini published a manual for those wishing to learn to be archaeologists. It
has never been out of print since then, and it is still widely used by students. In retrospect,
this book can be set alongside the conclusion of the Settefinestre project as a capstone
and finale to this period in Carandini’s life and thought (A. Carandini, 1979, 1981).
Carandini and Matte-Blanco

By the close of the 1970s Italy was reeling from a seemingly unending series of con-
vulsions. No doubt this impacted on Carandini as it did on his fellow citizens, but these
turbulent alarums and excursions also formed a resonant backdrop to a deepening per-
sonal crisis in his own life. He has made passing mention of what had brought him to this
point (Gnoli, 2015). He was fundamentally dissatisfied with himself. His first marriage
had broken up. He had achieved some kind of unspecified rapprochement with his father,
but the latter had died in 1972, three years before Bianchi Bandinelli, and Carandini felt a
persistent sense of acute loss, abandonment, and sadness. Moreover, he had come to the
close of a rewarding but intensive and exhausting archaeological project in Tuscany
carried out under the banner of Marxist materialism. As he looked around for a new area
of endeavour, he was more and more certain that the ideological premisses that had
framed his earlier work were played out and redundant.
In 1978 or thereabouts Carandini entered into psychoanalysis for the best part of a
decade. His encounter with the Chilean-born psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco
(1908–95) was a life-changing experience and one that he was often to acknowledge
as such. Born in Santiago, Matte-Blanco graduated as a doctor there in 1930. He entered
analysis with Fernando Allende Navarro, one of the pioneers of psychoanalysis in Latin
America (Honorato, 2012). He then went to London to train as a psychoanalyst. He
attended the seminars of Melanie Klein, supervised the case of a child with Anna Freud,
became a friend of Wilfred Bion, whom he thought of as a father figure or older brother,
and encountered James Strachey, the young Winnicott and Glover, Sharpe, Brierley,
Riviere, and Rickman (Fasoli, 1993). He practised and taught in the United States before
returning home in 1943. There he became one of the founders of the Chilean Psycho-
analytical Society. Then in 1966 he travelled to Rome, and after the coup that removed
McCaskie 11
Allende he never again returned to Chile. He lived and practised in Rome, where he died
in his late eighties in 1995 (Alameda, 2005; Vetö, 2017; Vetö and Sánchez, 2017).
Matte-Blanco was a theorist as well as a practitioner. His interest was in advancing
understanding of the unconscious beyond the thinking of Freud. The latter’s views of this
matter were contained in an ever-evolving series of interventions that all at once invited
and presumed further exploration (Freud, 1953[1900], 1953[1901], 1958a[1911],
1958b[1911], 1958[1912], 1961[1923], 1964[1932]). Matte-Blanco’s work in this area
appeared in book form in English in 1975. This attracted notice and a small but devoted
cult following, as did a second volume in 1988 that enlarged on his earlier arguments
(Carli and Giovagnoli, 2010; Carvalho et al., 2009; Ginzburg and Lombardi, 2007;
Lombardi, 2016; Matte-Blanco, 1975, 1988; Rayner, 1996; Sanchez-Cardenas, 2011).
Let us confine discussion to matters at hand. Matte-Blanco applied mathematical pro-
positions to Freud’s theories and developed from this the concept of unconscious logic
(or bi-logic). This was ruled over by the two principles of generalization and symmetry.
The first of these explained that unlike the logic of the conscious system, the logic of the
unconscious did not consider individuals as units, but as members of larger units like
classes or sets, and that Freudian displacement took place according to this principle. The
second, and more important here, according to Matte-Blanco, required the unconscious
always to treat the obverse/converse of every relationship in the same way, as if it were
always identical to it.
A consequence of this second principle, Matte-Blanco claimed, was the abolition of
linear time and space and their collapse into timelessness and spacelessness. The prin-
ciple of symmetrization precluded development, and the result was an infinitization
process, that is, a simultaneity and a repetition without end of that which was conven-
tionally termed the historical. In his eightieth year Matte-Blanco gave an interview about
his work. He lauded the Neruda poem that is extracted at the start of this paper because in
it the Inca mountain fortress at Machu Picchu was represented as a simultaneity standing
outside of time and space (in a sense like Freud’s famous metaphor about Rome and its
ruins). He went on to credit Freud with the discovery of timelessness, but since the
unconscious was processual in time there was a contradiction. This was an antinomy,
but Matte-Blanco said it was one that existed in all human lives nevertheless, At times
the unconscious followed the rules of Aristotelian logic, but for the most part it treated
time as if it did not exist. It was plain that this had profound implications for the
understanding of empirical events in any historical inquiry rooted in linear time (Fasoli,
1993).
Matte-Blanco’s impact on his analysand Carandini was at once immediate, sustained,
and enduring. In 1981, as noted, the latter authored a pioneering Italian manual on
stratigraphic and other archaeological techniques, and he dedicated this book to his
psychoanalyst (A. Carandini, 1981). We have some glimpses into this analytic encoun-
ter. Matte-Blanco was himself a ‘strong personality’, whose approach was to ‘demand’
that his interlocutors strive for an ‘undogmatic authenticity’ in their ‘difficult’ encoun-
ters with him (Alava, 2010: 22). Matte-Blanco sometimes showed up unannounced at
Carandini’s home. Conversational exchanges without rules followed, in which Carandini
said he lost track of the formal relationship and just felt blessed by his participation in an
incredible intellectual adventure. It ended as suddenly as it had begun. Matte-Blanco fell
ill and into decline at the end of the 1980s. By then Carandini had forged a new
partnership, and a daughter was born in 1989. After these life changes he wrote to
Matte-Blanco to thank him and to call an end to their professional relationship. Carandini
received no reply. He felt distress, even anguish, at his decision to part from Matte-
Blanco, for, as he later recalled, he had come to cast him in the role of a symbolic father
(Gnoli, 2015).
Whatever else transpired, at some level Carandini internalized and applied his inter-
locutor’s core opinions on the labile plasticity of time and space as decreed by the
structural unconscious. It has been noted that Freud himself had a very complicated
relationship with Rome, and although he advanced only to put aside his much-cited
imaginary of the past of the city as a visual simultaneity of eras and buildings, this
metaphor has never lost its power, for it addresses the psychical yearning for a past that is
coherent and transparent. If this is combined with Matte-Blanco’s abolition of time and
space, then for an archaeologist or historian it can be the call of the siren. Carandini drew
from all of this the lesson that the archaeologist must go ever further back in time to
foundational truths, in all senses of that capacious term, and that the tools of reason and
empiricism were not sufficient to pursue this quest. He thought now that foundational
origins partook of mystery and fantasy, and that these constituted the very air that
surrounded the archaeologist. In a predictably analogous way, Carandini came to con-
strue legend as the palpable noise or undergirding beneath the (hi)storical past that the
investigator formulated as narrative (Gnoli, 2015).
It was during his association with his psychoanalyst that Carandini found and started
on his new project, Elements of this were consonant with Matte-Blanco’s theorizing, but
the extent of his explicit or subconscious guidance towards this choice must remain
moot. Carandini planned to excavate (or in places to re-excavate) the north slope of the
Palatine Hill and associated sites in the Forum in the heart of ancient Rome. His purpose
was to fix and explain the origins of Rome and ipso facto the beginnings of much of
Western culture and civilization.
Carandini’s Rome: I. Looking for ways into the past

Excavating in the centre of Rome presented challenges greater than those posed by
working at Settefinestre. Just securing permission to dig in the area that was the hub
of the tourist industry must have required the mobilization of all the connections avail-
able to the barone Carandini. Once the project was in train, he brought to it all the skills
honed in his earlier work.
Scholarship on Rome has a long and vibrant topographical tradition. Current leaders
in this field include Filippo Coarelli, another protégé of Bianchi Bandinelli, and Eva
Margareta Steinby, professor of the archaeology of the Roman Empire at Oxford and
sometime director of the Finnish Institute in Rome (Coarelli, 1983, 1988, 2004, 2006,
2008; Steinby, 1974, 1993–2000). Carandini, however, intended to advance beyond such
incidental topography with its listing of more or less plausible identifications of succes-
sive constructions on specific sites. His agendum was to lay every possible archaeolo-
gical site open and transparent as landscape by digging until he reached what he
considered to be the limit or the bottom. The influence of Matte-Blanco (and Freud)
McCaskie 13
is salient here, and this was confirmed by Carandini in retrospect. He firmly repudiated
all academic boundaries and compared disciplinary specialization to the intellectual
nullity of a prison or grave. He lauded curiosity and instinct above all, and asserted that
a scholar ended up going nowhere without these characteristics (Gnoli, 2015).
In 1985, just west of the Arch of Titus where the northern slopes of the Palatine met
the Forum, Carandini found the remains of houses from the late Republic. One of these
he identified as the dwelling of a man who had been consul in 115 BCE. Underneath
were four more buildings from the sixth century BCE. Further excavations (1986–93)
showed that these had been built on top of an artificial platform. Beneath this Carandini
found a preserved stretch of wall that seemingly included a gateway. He dated these finds
to the mid eighth century BCE. The gate, he argued, was the Porta Mugonia. Even more
boldly, he claimed the remnant of wall was a portion of the circuit said in literary sources
to have been built by Romulus, legendary founder and first ruler of the city, who was
supposed to have lived in the eighth century BCE. In 2000 all of this was laid before the
public in a lavish exhibition (A. Carandini, 1992; Carandini and Cappelli, 2000; Car-
andini and Carafa, 1995: a dissenting view is in Coarelli, 1996; a summary excavation
chronology is in Hall, 2014: 119–22).
Meanwhile Carandini excavated a little further to the west and south, where topo-
graphers located the Domus Publica, the residence of the Pontifex Maximus. A dozen
identifiable layered phases came to light, datable from the mid eighth century BCE to the
destructive Neronian conflagration of 64 CE. The earliest date was congruent with that
of Carandini’s ‘Romulan’ wall, and when he then unearthed a courtyard dwelling there
from this first phase, he identified it as the royal palace of Romulus or of his successor.
Afterwards Carandini went on to find a grotto beneath the house of the first emperor,
Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE), and postulated that this might have been the Lupercal, the
legendary cave reported in the literary sources as the place where the twins Romulus and
Remus were suckled by a she-wolf.
In 1988 Carandini’s interim discoveries and theories about Romulus and the founda-
tion of Rome were publicized in the media. This caused a global sensation. Then in 1997
he published an 800-page book that furnished forth a prequel to the coming of Romulus.
La nascita di Roma is a curious but clever construct. It supplies an argument of dense
ethnographic and historical speculation about the archaeological finds that predate the
coming of Romulus. This permits the founder to be accorded his customary dating to the
mid eighth century BCE and casts him as the individual who rationalized and organized
what he inherited, thereby moving Rome on from proto-history to its formal historical
creation. The date that Carandini supplies for this foundation is the traditional one of 753
BCE, but it should be noted that this is not the only one in the literary sources (Timaeus,
for one, supplies an eccentric date of 813 BCE), and in fact none of these dates is
supported by any conclusive empirical evidence. Thus, in La nascita Romulus appears
in the epilogue at the end of the book after almost 500 pages of preliminary discussion
that works to condition the reader for his (seemingly inevitable?) appearance. This is not
by any means an easy book to read, but a decade after its publication Carandini sum-
marized its principal findings and his further thoughts for a general readership (A.
Carandini, 2007). Readers must decide for themselves whether or not Carandini’s con-
jectural bricolage to make his reconstructions fit with the archaeological chronology is
valid or not. Others have tried in a similar manner to resolve gaping lacunae in the
strictly historical evidence by resort to theorizing (Briquel, 2018; Grandazzi, 1997,
2017).
In La nascita Carandini advances a case for the veracity of atemporal mythography,
arguing that it can carry the living and unsullied memories of an oral culture over
centuries. He lists the major events (grandi avvenimenti) that calibrated the period from
1600–1300 BCE to the building of the Palatine wall and the formal founding of the city
by Romulus in 753 BCE. Indeed, he argues that the Palatine wall was multiply rebuilt
into the Augustan age, and that this reworking sustained an intact oral memory of what it
signified until it was finally written down. Carandini is prone to the misapprehension that
mythographic traditions must contain within them a kernel of truth (nocciolo autentico;
Hell, 2019; Sahlins, 2017). He goes on to suggest that the living memory of oral tradi-
tion, later on handed down via literary texts, is the only bulwark of truth against modern
presumptions and anachronisms. Finally, he explicitly embraces the world opened up to
him by and with Matte-Blanco. The case is made that myths are better understood via
intuitive emotional or unconscious reactions than via cognitive intellectual processes.
That is, the sleep of reason is desirable, and so it is to be encouraged (A. Carandini, 1997:
xxv, 9–13, 36–7, 632–3, 641–4; compare now A. Carandini, 2017c).
In 2000 Carandini, by now a familiar figure in the media and to the public, produced a
biographical memoir that set out a range of his ideas and thoughts (A. Carandini, 2000).
In a way this book is a pendant to La nascita, an attempt to ground and to explain the
changes that have occurred in the mental world of its author. This memoir claims that La
nascita is all at once archaeology and history, but also a means of analysing the author’s
life so as to reveal and to communicate his experiences. Certain threads can be picked
out. Carandini asserts that there are direct links between the novelist’s evocation of a
world and the historian’s reconstruction of a past. His preferred writers of fiction are
Proust, James, and Mann, masters of observation of material realities as filtered
through the sovereign interiority of the author. There can also be little doubt that
Carandini saw resonant echoes of his own familial descent, status, and relationships
in the fictive histories of the Guermantes and Buddenbrooks and in the Jamesian
mix of aristocracy and wealth. He also claims that he already understood all of this,
but credits Matte-Blanco with producing the liberating shock of recognition via
psychoanalysis. Another thread, connected perhaps with Carandini’s uncomfortable
time as an Italian boy at school in an England that had just defeated his own
country, is his ambiguous attitude towards his childhood hosts. He presents histor-
ical empiricism as an archaic tic of the English because of their devotion to the false
gods of detachment and objectivity. A subtext here is Carandini’s admission of an
insecurity that he thinks the English to be culturally immunized against, paired with
a sense that empiricist classical historians from that country patronize archaeolo-
gists, and particularly foreign ones. Lastly in this context, Carandini writes of the
lares in Roman culture. These were guardian spirits, entities that watched over and
shaped individual lives. He names his personal lares as his father, Bianchi Bandi-
nelli, and Matte-Blanco (A. Carandini, 2000: 3–7, 22, 28–30, 58–61, 77–8, 84–8,
92–7, 102, 127–9, 153).
McCaskie 15
Carandini’s Rome: II. Meditating on history and life

In the two decades since 2000 Carandini has produced an enviable quantity of published
work for a man of his years. It is often written in tandem with others, but there is no doubt
that in the familiar Italian manner the barone is in charge. These contributions are for the
most part enlargements or refinements of familiar arguments, now extended in time to
the age of Augustus and beyond. They are written in a late manner, that is, a personal
idiom, almost a recognizable signature, by which is meant a distillation to essentials of
the authorial voice (Said, 2003, 2007). Carandini combines deep learning with a com-
bative style that switches between defence and attack and is peppered more than ever
with personal idiosyncrasies and quirks. All this is apparent in the monumentalization of
his own thinking and achievement over a lifetime that is on display in the massive atlas
of ancient Rome that at last he ushered into print in 2012 (A. Carandini, 2012). Published
two years after his retirement from La Sapienza (followed by a succession of jobs in
national cultural policy), the atlas was greeted as an international media event. It sig-
nalled to many the very model of the idealized later life of the most exalted Italian
academic. It linked together a patronage formed at universities and a public persona
displayed across the media with access to the state and the benefices at its disposal. By
my own count the atlas has 31 named contributors, seemingly all Italian. Of these, the
core that did the bulk of the writing were nearly all pupils, junior associates, or clients of
Carandini. A number were already collaborators in defending his vision of Rome against
the many criticisms of other classicists (on Fraschetti, see Carandini, Carafa, and d’Ales-
sio, 2008; on Coarelli, see Carafa and Bruno, 2013; on Beard, see ‘La prima Roma di
Mary Beard’, in Carandini et al., 2017: Vol. 1, 47–56).
After the reviews were in, Carandini took the opportunity of the translation of the
atlas into English to write a new preface to it (A. Carandini, 2017: Vol. 1, 1–14). This
begins with a declaration that echoes the historical simultaneity of Freud in his Civiliza-
tion and Its Discontents, and a brief endorsement of the atemporality of Matte-Blanco’s
unconscious logic. Carandini then decries the isolating attention accorded to significant
buildings by scholars. Instead, he urges an opening up of the topographical mind to
implicit as well as explicit interconnections across a whole landscape. Everything seen or
merely sensed, from single tiles in a mosaic to individual words in a sentence, he argues,
is equally important to understanding. In a range of metaphors that compare the devel-
opment of Rome to an organic or natural evolution presided over by the genius loci of the
place and its interpreter Carandini, he reiterates the findings made in La nascita. He
claims that under the sign of psychoanalysis he has brought into being a ‘topographical
hermeneutics’ that is asserted rather than defined. Then at last we arrive at the heart of
the matter. Studying Rome, so Carandini declares, demands that the investigator behave
in precisely the same way as if trying to understand the self. This depends on the
incomplete recuperation of memories and haphazard intuitions about the future. Locke
and Hume are brought into play, but the real shadow presence here is Matte-Blanco with
his fundamental scepticism about a ‘temporal continuum’ either in the life of an indi-
vidual or in the evolution of Rome. At the end Carandini declares that the past of the city
of Rome is ‘a continuum only in fiction’, and that the mastery of archaeology over this
landscape of ruins ‘requires a clear affirmation of the researcher’s self’. Rome, then, is
not ‘the mechanical sum of its parts’, but rather ‘a fully organic organism’ in which
buildings are like neurons in an intelligence. These neurons afford a point of view, and
all such perspectives ‘fuse into one enormous collective mind’.
Carandini was 75 when his self-conscious magnum opus of an atlas was published in
2012. In the English-language preface composed five years later he mentioned only one
contemporary classical historian. This was T. P. Wiseman, who was a scant three years
younger than Carandini, and who had already published ‘an ample review’ of the Italian
edition. This, Carandini added succinctly, ‘will prove important in making the work
known to the Anglo-Saxon world’. He went on to reassure Wiseman that ‘(as opposed to
our facts and arguments) our method is in continual development’ and hence in no way
‘dogmatic’. In fact, if it had not been for attention to this methodological evolution, ‘the
achievement Wiseman claims to have recognized would have been impossible’ (A.
Carandini, 2017: Vol. 1, 4, 7–8).
These remarks were jejune, perhaps even disingenuous. In his review Wiseman had
written of Carandini’s atlas with arch exasperation (Wiseman, 2013). In fact, this was
one waystation on a road long travelled. In 2000 Wiseman reviewed La nascita after two
years of multiple re-readings, ‘for I have still no idea how to review it’. It was a ‘great
work but an impossible one’, for it ‘both demands serious intellectual engagement and at
the same time defies it’ (Wiseman, 2000). In a like manner the atlas trumpeted a
methodology (which presumably included the ‘topographical hermeneutics’) that was
little more than ‘rhetorical polemic aimed at the preconceptions of historians (especially
the scuola inglese)’ (Wiseman, 2013). Wiseman is a long-standing critic of the Carandini
that emerged after undergoing psychoanalysis. He has written a great deal himself, and
continues to engage with Carandini’s texts long after other empirical classical historians
of his kind have consigned them to silence or scepticism (Cornell, 1995; Forsythe, 2005).
In his most recent book on the history of ‘the house of Augustus’ his principal target is
once more the work of Carandini (Wiseman, 2019: 23, 28). This is a quarrel that offers
no chance of reconciliation. Wiseman is committed to the empirical method that Car-
andini now disdains. There is another reason why this circle cannot be closed. Simply,
historical empiricism in the study of early Rome is reliant upon written texts produced
centuries after the events they purport to describe. In this situation there can be no final
word, and, indeed, Wiseman himself has been rebuked for speculative conclusions
drawn from his undoubted mastery of what are incomplete and contradictory records
(Beard, 2009, 2015: 541).
For over a decade now Carandini has been publishing books that simplify and reiter-
ate his arguments for an interested public, while continuing to produce elaborations of
his thinking about Rome (A. Carandini, 2010, 2011, 2016, 2017d, 2018a; Carandini and
Papi, 2019). In Italy he has become a seer, at least in the sense that his views are sought
on all manner of issues. Most to the point here, in 2017 he wrote a short book about the
antinomies he saw in his own life experience. This had the distinctly archaeological
subtitle of digging into and excavating the self or ego (A. Carandini, 2017a). The book
was composed of 142 reflections on emotion and reason drawn from ancient sources.
Carandini set down his opinion that emotion was primordial and had come first. It was
archaic and comforting, with the ability to reveal a whole world in condensed detail.
Reason had followed, with its somewhat mechanical capacities for organization,
McCaskie 17
distinction, and judgement. For Carandini, the antinomies that ensued from the mutual
dependence of emotion and reason were the truest source of knowledge and understand-
ing. They were prior to and more significant than the Western investments made in
sovereign logic since the time of Aristotle.
Here Carandini implicitly revisited Freud and Matte-Blanco, and explained himself
and his work in terms of the ceaselessly fruitful interplay of these antinomies. Indeed, in
an interview he gave when the book was published he said explicitly that the source of
his reasoning in the text had been generated and then matured from his lengthy psycho-
analytical encounter with Matte-Blanco. Psychoanalysis had also taught him that anti-
nomies were most fruitful when ‘well tempered’ (ben temperata), a kind of bi-modal
catechism for life and work (Panza, 2017). This echo of Matte-Blanco is far indeed from
the procedures of orthodox archaeologists and historians. Carandini appears to have been
saying, in the manner of Vico (or even Croce), that the dissection of historical processes
always presumed a philosophy of history that framed an understanding arrived at intui-
tively. So, as first unveiled by Freud, history was a chaos and a harmony of emotion and
reason. This was a necessary but dauntingly difficult thing to address because, in the term
employed by Matte-Blanco, the finite was controllable because conceivable but the
infinite could only be ‘feasible’ (A. Carandini, 2018b).
Concluding remarks
Rome and its past are objectively monumental presences in Western history, and in the
ocean of subjective imaginaries woven from and around them. The matter of Rome is
culturally inspissated, with long centuries of commentary and reflection thickened and
congealed around it. In sum, Rome is a seriously overdetermined subject. It has for long
been a totemic site in the European imaginary’s ‘desire for the past’ mentioned at the
start of this paper. Edward Gibbon himself, after 25 years had elapsed, wrote that he was
‘not very susceptible to enthusiasm’, but still, ‘I can neither forget nor express the strong
emotions which agitated my mind as I first approached and entered the eternal city’
(Gibbon, 1984: 141; original emphasis).
The consequence is that writing about Rome is an act that needs to remain always
vigilant about the preconceptions already planted in the authorial self by the immense
discourse authorized by the sheer cultural density of the subject matter. Of course, the
preconditioned self is there in all writing, but the status of Rome as a touchstone and
point of reference in the Western tradition means that it has an unusually strong capacity
to shape individual sensibilities at both the conscious and subconscious levels. Thus, by
way of summary example, the historian Syme sought clues and insights to explain Hitler
in the last tumultuous century of the Roman Republic; and the poet Brodsky, in Soviet
exile on the White Sea, identified his fellow poet Ovid, deported from Rome to the shore
of the Black Sea almost 2000 years earlier, as his twin or doppelgänger in a continuously
living tradition (Syme, 1939; Volkov, 1998).
For a conventionally trained and inclined historian the wellsprings of these impulses
are to be acknowledged as seductions towards an autobiographical exploration that
should be resisted and quarantined. That is to say, the Roman past must and does
properly ‘vibrate’ within the mind of such a historian, but orthodoxy ordains that such
sensations should never be permitted to spill over into an embrace of the subjective aims
and purposes of an individual selfhood in the business of recuperating the past (Colling-
wood, 1946).
Let me try to sum up. The empirical substance of this essay has been about why, how,
and with what consequences Andrea Carandini, the archaeological investigator of early
Rome, came to transgress received historical norms and then to neglect or abandon them.
Most working archaeologists, prehistorians, or historians of all places or periods sub-
scribe – that is, if and when they think about the matter at all – to some version or variant
of Momigliano’s celebrated catechism about working on the past that lists le regole del
giuoco nello studio della storia antica, or ‘the rules of the game in the study of ancient
history’ (Momigliano, 1974, 2016). These guidelines are embedded in and bounded by
the discovery and interpretative employment of documentary and ancillary sources. The
devil is not at all in this literal detail, however, but is and always has been in the degree of
conscious control that the historian is able or willing to exercise over the inescapable
impulses of selfhood that frame and inflect interpretation of any and all historical
problems.
It needs to be openly admitted, however, that whatever the nature of its embedded
orthodoxies, history is not and has never been a science, let alone an exact one. It is not
an overstatement of the case to say that Momigliano’s ‘rules of the game’ are in and of
themselves a temporal construct, traceable in the first instance to 18th-century German
Quellenkritik and then to its 19th-century positivist refinement and expansion. Even
Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), apostle of the positivist creed of recounting history
‘as it really was’ – wie es eigentlich gewesen ist – seems to have deviated from his
objective empirical strictness when it came to writing about the past of his wife’s Irish
Catholic culture (Boldt, 2014). To put it simply, the truth claims of history writing are
unstably grounded in the interpretative capacities and ethical biases of individual histor-
ians working from, with, and on an always incomplete and sometimes even threadbare
record. It might be argued, then, that the complex trajectory of Carandini’s intellectual
career, discussed in detail above, is no more or less authoritative in its interpretations
than those of his more orthodox critics like Wiseman. An inclusive reading would argue
that both are searching after truths about the past that satisfy their ‘truth’ to themselves as
subjective actors. Surely the foregrounding of interpretation, with its plethora of
approaches and the uses made of them by individuals, should be more freely and openly
acknowledged. After all, in practice this is what historians actually do, even if many
among them still feel impelled to gesture towards an idealized but chimerical ‘truth’ that
is presumed to be somewhere ‘out there’ awaiting discovery.
It is my final contention here that we may well disagree with Carandini’s chosen
methods and the results they produce, but surely his catholicity in his attempts to bring
novel perspectives to bear upon the past is a matter for some celebration. He is also in
tune with the mood music of the present in the aftermath of the linguistic and cultural
turns and the resulting fragmentation of the certainties of the Enlightenment project. This
has engendered wide and experimental processes of intellectual rethinking and reformu-
lation. Some of these are of course missteps or blind alleys, but it is the urgent willing-
ness to rethink inherited disciplinary boundaries and barriers that is of fundamental
significance. Some, of course, regret the liquidation of received certainties or otherwise
McCaskie 19
mourn the disappearance of familiar frameworks that informed and shaped their
earlier intellectual investments (compare Gray, 2018, with Eley, 2005, and Israel,
2019: 923–42). With due caution others embrace the now prevalent and still growing
intellectual diversity of history writing in our times. In this endeavour there is a place
for historians to consider the utility of psychoanalytic understandings for their own
projects. Psychoanalysis, it has been argued, ‘is not the key to all lived experience’, but
it yields insights into the past that are ‘hypothetical and provisional, as indeed are all
historical interpretations’ (Alexander and Taylor, 2012: 7; emphasis added). Thus,
Carandini can be seen as an instance of a historical actor whose subjectivity, evolving
via engagement with the tools of psychoanalysis, has been encouraged to a consider-
ation of himself in tandem with his comprehension of the past. Moreover, the anti-
nomies evident in his life and thinking must be recognizable in some measure to all
those currently engaged in attempts at innovative knowledge production across the
spectrum of scholarly disciplines.
Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Tom McCaskie https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1021-7724
Note
This article benefited from readings by Matthew Hilton, Niels Kastfelt, Chris Wickham, and Peter
Wiseman, and more remotely from conversations with the late Isaiah Berlin and Moses Finley. I
would also like to thank the editors and reviewers of this journal for their encouragement and
suggestions.
1. Neruda (1980[1944]). The preserved 15th-century Inca fortress city of Machu Picchu is in the
remoteness of the Chilean Andes and was never reached by the Spanish conquistadores. Neruda
made the then difficult journey there on horseback in 1943, and his translator Felstiner made the
same journey in 1967.
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Author biography
Tom McCaskie was Professor of Asante History at Birmingham University and then Professor of
the History of Africa at SOAS University of London until his retirement in 2011. He is now an
honorary senior research fellow in the Department of African Studies and Anthropology at
Birmingham University. For a sample of his work on Africa, see the 50 essays reprinted with
new introductions in his Asante, Kingdom of Gold: Essays in the History of an African Culture
(Carolina Academic Press, 2015). He has also written on the historiography of Achaemenid Persia.
He lives in France and can be contacted at tommccaskie@aol.com.

ANDREA CARANDINI

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ANDREA CARANDINI

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Original Article

History of the Human Sciences

archaeologist: Andrea journals.sagepub.com/home/hhs

Carandini, the ruins

When the clay-colored hand

Rome, Freud, and Carandini

Carandini’s family and formation

Carandini, Bianchi Bandinelli, and Marxism

Carandini’s early work and career

In the aftermath of Carandini’s landmark excavations, survey work was extended to

National and personal disorientation

Carandini and Matte-Blanco

Carandini’s Rome: I. Looking for ways into the past

Carandini’s Rome: II. Meditating on history and life

Declaration of conflicting interests

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