di Maria Oliveri
Tireless and passionate researcher, she studied the Addaura graffiti and saved the Salinas collection. Sicilian by adoption, she fought for women's rights.
«Jole Marconi Bovio I remember her at an already mature age, at a «première» of the Teatro Massimo, very elegant in her long black lace dress, small, her round face framed by curly white hair, dangling earrings.
A gentle lady with a sweet air, who certainly did not denounce the internationally renowned scholar, the cultured and prepared archaeologist, who for years was one of the most important characters in the Sicilian scientific world ».
So writes Anna Pomar, sketching an extraordinarily suggestive portrait of the archaeologist - author of 67 scientific publications - who conducted 30 archeology and prehistory excavation campaigns in Sicily, receiving the gold medal for cultural merit and the mention of commendatore of the Republic.
Iole, Sicilian by adoption, was born in Rome on 21 January 1897 to Giovanni Bovio, a high-ranking Piedmontese official, and Giulia Beccaria, descendant of the famous Cesare, author of the essay "On Crimes and Punishments".
He graduated in literature in 1921 at the La Sapienza University and thanks to a scholarship he managed to specialize in 1924 at the Italian Archaeological School in Athens.
While studying in Greece, among excavations and finds from the classical world, Jole ends up falling in love with a fellow archaeologist, Pirro Marconi from Verona.
Back in Italy in 1926 Jole and Pirro get married and she also adopts her husband's surname. The couple moved to Sicily where, at the invitation of the archaeologist Paolo Orsi in 1927, Pirro Marconi obtained the position of director from 1929 to 1932 of the National Museum of Palermo and of the Office of Antiquities of Western Sicily.
In 1928 Jole gave birth to a girl, Marina. Marriage and motherhood do not constitute an obstacle for the young archaeologist, who dedicates herself with the utmost commitment to numerous excavation campaigns on the island, in the provinces of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento.
Gradually, with a decisive attitude in the face of the many difficulties of a profession generally reserved for men, Jole will be able to pursue a brilliant career.
An iron will and a great passion guide this ante litteram feminist and suffragette who, still a girl, even before the advent of fascism, had joined the battle for women's right to vote with great enthusiasm.
Jole is tireless: he takes care of both the excavations and the cataloging of the finds, right from the first campaigns in Boccadifalco and Termini Imerese.
In December 1936 her husband Pirro was called to direct the Italian archaeological mission in Albania but Jole remained in Palermo, where in 1937 he was appointed Director of the National Archaeological Museum of Palermo. In 1938 she was in charge of a second excavation campaign in the Grotta del Vecchiuzzo (Petralia Sottana) and of the megalithic fortifications on the Rocca di Cefalù.
However, a terrible misfortune suddenly strikes Jole's quiet life, made up of study and work: on April 30, 1938 Pirro, who is returning to Sicily from his beloved wife, dies in a plane crash in the sky over Formia and Jole she is prematurely widowed. Her work becomes her reason for living, she embraces her mission with commitment and dedication.
In 1939 she was called to fill the role of Superintendent of Antiquities and Fine Arts for Western Sicily. In Italy at that time only two women held this role, Jole Bovio Marconi and Bruna Forlati Tamaro.
Jole remained director of the Archaeological Superintendence of Western Sicily from the XNUMXs until the XNUMXs.
During the Second World War in 1941 he was regent of the Superintendencies of Agrigento and Caltanissetta. When the bombs on Palermo multiply, Bovio, as superintendent of antiquities and fine arts for the province of Palermo, asks the prefect for immediate intervention for the assignment of timber to collect the sculptures of Selinunte and Himera.
He devoted himself with tireless commitment to making the collections of the National Museum safe, transferring some works, suitably packed, to the cellars and moving 165 paintings, 41 sculptures, 1072 works of various art, 449 gold and antiquarium objects, as well as a few thousand coins in a secret place, for security reasons generically referred to as a "refuge (...) in an isolated location (only in 1946 will the secret place be revealed: the Benedictine abbey of San Martino delle Scale)".
La Bovio is just in time to save the archaeological heritage: the bombing of April 5, 1943 in fact hit the Church of Sant'Ignazio all'Olivella, destroying a wing of the Salinas Archaeological Museum (former convent of the Filipino fathers).
At the end of the war, it was still Jole who took care of the restoration of the building and the new arrangement of the collections, in refined display cases with a new concept, created by Fontana Arte.
The difficult restoration work, characterized by the scarcity of funds available, lasted seven years, until April 1952 when the Salinas Museum reopened its doors.
Jole does not stop: in the following years she alternates the role of Director and superintendent with that of teacher, in fact she is entrusted with the chair of Archeology and History of Greek and Roman art (from 1943 to 1948) and of Paleontology from 1944 until 1967 .
In 1953 his studies on the Addaura graffiti were published. The official version of the discovery is that in 1943 the accidental explosion of a depot of munitions and explosives of the Allied forces, in a cave on Monte Pellegrino, with the consequent collapse of a wall, had brought to light graffiti hitherto covered by the patina of the time.
An extraordinary complex of petroglyphs dating from the final Epigravettian to the Mesolithic, most likely depicting a shamanic rite.
The graffiti had actually been discovered by Giovanni Cusimano, a treasure seeker, but it was only after a fortuitous meeting with Giosuè Meli (at the time assistant to the Superintendence, the one who since 1949 had carried out the excavations at the Grotta del Genovese on the Island of Levanzo) and Giuseppe Saccone (enthusiast of archeology) that Cusimano had decided to show them the graffiti of the Addaura Cave.
Immediately afterwards, the Superintendent Jole Bovio Marconi was informed and from that moment on she had taken steps with enthusiasm to study and protect this heritage.
In the 50s La Bovio excavated in the Niscemi cave on Monte Pellegrino, in the Cala Genovesi cave on the island of Levanzo, in the Egadi, in Erice and in Marsala (the ancient Lylibeum).
Between 1957 and 1959, Bovio designed and built the anastylosis (“rising”) of some columns of temple E of Selinunte, to allow visitors to better understand the archaeological site. However, this intervention still arouses criticism and perplexity.
Jole is also always ready to advance and support women's rights, in society and in the professions: she is an authoritative member of Fildis (the first international women's association present in Palermo) and she is a founding member and then president of the Soroptimist Club of Palermo.
She is fully inserted in the Sicilian intellectual world for her culture, her passion for opera and concerts, love for the arts and painting.
Her career as an archaeologist ends in 1979, with the publication of the long work of the excavations in the Grotta del Vecchiuzzo.
Jole Bovio Marconi dies in Palermo, after an intense life, on April 14, 1986.
Ten years after her death, in 1996, the management of the “Antonio Salinas” Regional Archaeological Museum decided to name the prehistoric section of the museum after this truly extraordinary woman and to dedicate a volume to her in the Museum Notebooks.
Maria Oliveri
Historian, essayist and cultural operator
Original article published on August 1, 2022 by BALARM
Here the link to RaiPlay Italian dedicated to Jole Bovio Marconi
From Grazia Deledda to Rita Levi Montalcini, from Francesca Cabrini to Nilde Iotti. Daughters of the people or aristocratic, refined or uncultured, "Italian" is a fresco of about 250 stories which, starting from the Risorgimento, tells our country through the lives of the many women to whom we must all say thanks and towards whom we feel the civil duty to preserve his memory and continue his commitment. In all lies the merit of having contributed to the collective growth of women, their emancipation and awareness of being protagonists. “Italiane” is a Rai Per il Sociale production created in collaboration with the Department of Information and Publishing of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, the Department for Equal Opportunities of the PCM, the Rai Radio Directorate and RaiPlay Sound
