The foundation of the American Academy in Rome dates back more than one hundred years to the early decades of the last century. Over the years, the Academy has acquired a study collection of material goods from antiquity, including coins, statues and figurines, lamps, stucco and other architectural fragments, jewelry, and inscriptions. While most are Roman in origin, some pieces are Greek or Etruscan. Some were gifts, others come from long-ago excavations, a few were bought. The Collection of Antiquities of the American Academy in Rome, the latest addition to the Supplements to the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome series, focuses on highlights of the collection. Sections of the work are written by area specialists, with introductory material contributed by volume editors Larissa Bonfante and Helen Nagy, both of whom have published widely in archaeology and art history.

Larissa Bonfante is Professor of Classics Emerita at New York University. She has spent many summers undertaking research at the American Academy in Rome.  Helen Nagy is Professor Emerita of Art History at the University of Puget Sound, where she taught Ancient and Medieval Art History and Humanities.
 

“Telling the story of the Academy through the history of the collections is a superb way of tying it to the history of that ‘sacrosanct antiquity’ that has drawn American students to Rome from the very beginning.”
—Eugene Dwyer, Kenyon College