GIANFRANCESCO GAMURRINI (1835-1923)
The building at No. 11 of this street reminds us of the Gamurrini family. Gianfrancesco Gamurrini was one of the most important archaeologists in Italy during the second half of the 19th century and he published a fundamental study about Roman ceramics in Arezzo. He later became Director of the Archaeological Museum in Florence and in 1876 he moved to the General Management of Antiquities for the Ministry of Education. In 1880 the ‘Commissariato della Conservazione dei Monumenti della Toscana’ and of the excavations in Etruria and so he became Director of the Archaeological Map of Etruria. An academic of the Lincei, he wrote about Art History, Numismatics, Etruscan and Roman Epigraphy, Hagiography and he even delighted in poetry. For more than 50 years, he was Director of the library of the ‘Fraternità dei Laici’, which later became part of the public library in Arezzo. In 1883 he discovered there a Medieval copy of a manuscript dating back to the 4th century A. D., the “Peregrinatio Egeriae”, which was fundamental to the understanding of the ancient Christian Church, of the Holy Land and, in particular, of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
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