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Summary
Author: Apolloni Ghetti, B.M. (and others)
Title: Esplorazioni sotto la Confessione di San Pietro in Vaticano eseguite negli anni 1940-1949.
Publication: Città del Vaticano, 1951.
Price: £750
Reference: 06901
Full Description
Large folio. 2 vols. xi + 277 + (3)pp, (10) coloured or tinted plates (lettered A-I, K), 171 text ills (many of which photo) ; 17 + (5)pp, 109 plates (of which 103 photo, rest folding ground plans). Publisher's cloth. One of 1500 numbered sets. Duplicate from library of University of Augsburg, with their neat library stamp and disposal stamp on verso of title leaves, and another library stamp at end of each volume. Traces left by removed library labels on spines and on front free endpapers, but a good set, very clean internally.
These admirable volumes, fully illustrated, handsomely printed, soundly bound, and published with almost unimaginable promptness only two years after the end of the excavations which they record, constitute the official record of the excavations carried out in and around the traditional site of the tomb of St.Peter between 1940 and 1949, at the express wish of Pope Pius XII. Although the archaeology did not prove decisive as to the whereabouts of the body of St.Peter himself, it provided a wealth of evidence for the cult of the saint from the early Christian period onwards and it also revealed that the site of the tomb lay within the boundaries of an extensive pagan Roman cemetery concealed below the later Christian church. A numismatic appendix by Marchese Camillo Serafini records and illustrates the very numerous coins dropped as offerings at the shrine by pilgrims of the early middle ages ; British readers may be familiar with the Anglo-Saxon coins, which have subsequently been republished in the British Numismatic Journal, but the sixteen further coins of Norman kings testify to continued devotion to St.Peter by English pilgrims up to the reign of Henry I.