Chapter Il casino del Chiatamone come crocevia della “riscoperta” di Paestum

Overview & Synopsis

This contributes outlines the lesser-known history of the royal casino of Chiatamone during the period when it was the residence of General Don Felice Gazzola, reconstructing events through the eyes of foreign travellers, in particular the French pensionnair Pierre-Louis Moreau-Desproux. A meeting place for masonic lodges, it also played a key role in the process of “rediscovery” of Paestum initiated by the general from Piacenza, who used the casino not as a residence but as a privileged space in which to promote and display, with great generosity, the reliefs of the Posidonian antiquities he had commissioned and which were to form the iconographic backbone of a larger publishing project that was never published except in part and belatedly by Paolo Antonio Paoli.