Realia sonori e musicali del Veneto antico

Sound- and music-related realia are not merely remnants of a distant past: they encode stories, gestures, rituals, emotions, and identities. This dissertation offers the first systematic examination of the sound- and music-associated artifacts preserved in the archaeological museums of the Veneto region, spanning from Protohistory to Late Antiquity, with the aim of refining our understanding of the practices, contexts, and meanings connected to sound production within the cultures that inhabited this territory. The first chapter is structured in two parts: the first addresses pre-Roman materials, with particular emphasis on artifacts attributable to the ancient Veneti; the second turns to realia dating to the Roman and Late Antique periods. The second chapter focuses entirely on Roman tintinnabula, the most widespread category of sound-producing artifacts in Venetian collections; after reconstructing their practical and symbolic functions, it proposes a new typological classification, subsequently applied to all known specimens from Veneto, with special attention to problematic cases and longstanding misidentifications perpetuated by antiquarian scholarship. The third chapter presents a comprehensive catalogue of the 220 identified objects, structured according to the RIMAnt model, designed to foreground the dual nature of these items as both archaeological artifacts and sound-producing instruments. The dissertation therefore both expands current knowledge of the ancient Venetian soundscape and provides methodological and cataloguing tools applicable not only to the study of music-related artifacts housed in the region’s museums but also to comparable research in other contexts, thereby establishing a solid foundation for future investigations in the hope that the sonic dimension of antiquity — long marginalized in archaeological studies — may assume an increasingly central role in the interpretation of past cultures.