become theWrst of many schools opened during the imperial period. At
a colloquium organized to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the institution,
Jean-Marc Delaunay (2000: 127) indicated that, in addition to the opposition
against the Germans, the creation of the French School in Athens was also
related to competition against the British, and, to a certain extent, the
Russians who complained about its foundation. So powerful was its diplo-
matic role that even when the French monarchy was deposed in 1848, the
French School was left unharmed. As Delaunay argues, in Greece the British
had their merchants and sailors, the Russians the Orthodox clerics, and the
Germans the Greek monarchy of Bavarian origin. The French only had their
school. When the Germans thought of opening a rival branch in Athens,
the traditional French antipathy for the British turned towards the Germans
(ibid. 128).
Turning to Russia, there was a Commission of Archaeological Finds in
Rome operating at least from the 1840s, which employed Stephan Gedeonov,
a future director of the Hermitage Museum. In the early 1860s he managed to
acquire 760 pieces of antique art, mainly coming from Etruscan tombs. These
had been collected by the Marquis di Cavelli, Giampietro (Giovanni Pietro)
Campana (1808–80), known as the patron of nineteenth-century
tomb-robbers (Norman 1997: 91). Other parts of the collection—not includ-
ing antiquities—were bought by the South Kensington Museum, and another
by the Museum Napoleon III—a polemic and ephemeral museum opened
and closed in 1862 in Paris—and later dispersed in museums throughout
France (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 168–78).
In contrast to the situation in the Ottoman Empire, in Italy and Greece
experts had to content themselves with studying the archaeology in situ owing
to the ban on any antiquities leaving the country. In several of the Italian
states this had been the case for a long time. Although the success of the
regulations had been unequal, the Napoleonic experience had reinvigorated
the determination to stop ancient works of art leaving the country: new
legislation such as the Roman edict of 1820 had been issued in this context
(Barbanera 2000: 43). In Greece the export of antiquities was also out-
lawed in 1827 (Gran-Aymerich 1998: 47), although the continued trade in
antiquities made them partly ineVective. Given the impossibility of obtain-
ing riches for their museums by oYcial means, together with opposition
from local archaeologists to foreigners excavating in their own countries,
most excavations in Italy and Greece were undertaken by native archaeolo-
gists. Examples of these were, in Italy, Carlo Fea (1753–1836), Antonio
Nibby (1792–1836), Pietro de la Rosa and Luigi Canina (1795–1856) at
Rome (Moatti 1993: ch. 5), and Giuseppe Fiorelli at Pompeii. In Greece the
main archaeologists were Kyriakos Pittakis, Stephanos Koumanoudis and
Europe and the Ottoman Empire 103