On August 16, 1972, in Riace, a quaint town on Calabria’s “Rainbow Coast,” formerly the land of Ulysses, the sea shimmered as sluggish holiday-makers lounged on the beach. It was Ferragosto, Italy’s national summer holiday, when schools close, cities empty, the coastlines fill, and also when a Roman chemist named Stefano Mariottini was on vacation.
That afternoon, Mariottini went diving, hunting for amberjacks and sea bream with his speargun. Twenty-six feet below the surface, he spotted something strange poking out of the sand. At first, it looked like a human hand. Could it be a body? he wondered. But as he brushed the sediment away, he realized it was something else entirely. “As I cleaned,” he told the Italian newspaper Quotidiano Nazionale, “I saw it was dark green and elaborately constructed.”
Mariottini had found a bronze statue with curly hair and a flowing beard. It was six feet long and lying on its hip. A few feet away lay another. Two ancient warriors, frozen in time on the seabed of the Mediterranean. Mariottini surfaced and called the local carabinieri.
A week later, divers and archaeologists swarmed the site. Beachgoers watched as thick ropes were fastened to inflatable pontoons and the statues were slowly lifted from the water.
Bronze rarely survives from ancient times—given its value, most of it was melted down and reforged by looters long ago. Now two intact Greek warriors, sculpted around 460 to 450 B.C., had risen from the deep. The archaeologist Daniele Castrizio would later call one of them “the most technically perfect example of bronze casting to have come down to us from antiquity.”
It was a sensation. The New York Times ran the headline “Men of Bronze Defeat Time.” The Italian press called them “giganti del mare”—giants of the sea. They eventually became known as the bronzi di Riace, or the Riace bronzes, and entered the pop-culture lexicon: a man with a chiseled physique might be called a bronzo di Riace.
But behind the scenes, questions have swirled around the bronzes for half a century. In May, an investigation by Italy’s national broadcaster TG1 suggested the bronzes might not have originated in Riace after all but from somewhere in Sicily. Then, a few days later, a prosecutor in the Sicilian city of Siracusa opened an investigation, asking: Did Mariottini really find the bronzes? Or had the discovery been staged to cover up an antiquities-smuggling scheme?
Murky Origins
In a region often defined by corruption, poverty, and the shadow of the ’Ndrangheta (the local Mafia offshoot), the bronzes became a rare source of pride for Calabria. Experts traced the statues’ origins to the Argive school of sculpture in the Peloponnese peninsula, linking them to masters such as Polykleitos and Myron, who were known for their exacting anatomical precision. Most academics believed the warriors were lost at sea during transport in the Hellenistic or Roman era.
In the years following their discovery, the bronzes toured Italy. By 1981, 300,000 people had visited them at Rome’s Quirinale Palace. When plans emerged to send them to a museum in Los Angeles, the country rebelled. Students, ministers, and housewives all weighed in—the bronzes weren’t just artworks; they were national treasures. (The bronzes never made it to L.A.)
Yet doubts about the bronzes started to crop up the very day they were found. Around midday on August 16, 1972, four local boys—Cosimo and Antonio Alì, Domenico Campagna, and Giuseppe Sgrò—told the carabinieri that they’d spotted more than two statues before Mariottini claimed to have found them. At the time, authorities dismissed the story as a bid for attention. Five years later, a judge awarded Mariottini a reward of 125 million lire (roughly $75,000) for his discovery. The boys were never acknowledged.
In the 1980s, the American archaeologists R. Ross Holloway and Anna Marguerite McCann alleged in research papers that the bronzes hadn’t been shipwrecked off Riace in antiquity but, rather, deliberately smuggled there in recent times. Based on metallurgical evidence, they argued that the statues may have been looted during Rome’s 212 B.C. sack of Siracusa but that no ancient trade route would have taken them to Riace. Most importantly, the archaeologists pointed out that the statues didn’t look like shipwreck debris at all—they appeared carefully placed on the seabed, as if lowered there intentionally. No shipwreck debris was ever found in the Riace area.
At the time, few took the claims seriously. Scientific dating methods weren’t as advanced in the 1970s and 1980s as they are now, and the statues’ provenance couldn’t be confirmed. The debate was put to rest.
Since then, though, new evidence has emerged to support Holloway and McCann’s theory. Last year, researchers found that while the bronzes’ cores trace back to the Peloponnese, the clay used to join their limbs came from the Anapo River, near Siracusa. The implication: the statues were assembled—or re-assembled—in Sicily.
According to the TG1 investigation, the bronzes have long been the stuff of legend in Brucoli, a small town near Siracusa. In May, a local restaurateur, Marco Bertoni, claimed his father saw divers pull statues from the sea there in 1971—a year before Mariottini reportedly found the Riace bronzes—and even recalled a visit from the French oceanographer and director Jacques Cousteau, who was reportedly filming a documentary there at the time. (He believes that divers working for Cousteau discovered the statues without the oceanographer’s knowledge.) Some anonymous witnesses TG1 spoke to claimed they saw four statues. Others insisted there were seven. “There were five,” one man said, “and two lions.”
The investigation points to a possible deal between the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and Sicily’s Mafia, the Cosa Nostra. Mimmo, Marco’s brother, told TG1 that the statues were shipped across the Strait of Messina in 1971 to Calabria on a “large fishing vessel,” delivered to a family there, and later sold abroad via Switzerland with the help of a “Sicilian-Calabrian” businessman—except for two, which were hidden underwater in Riace and discovered the following year.
According to this account, the staged discovery was meant to legitimize the illicit trade of the others—or to distract from it. Despite myriad claims and ongoing investigations, none of the alleged additional statues or missing accessories have ever been definitively recovered. While this particular informant suggests a “plant,” there is no evidence that Mariottini was directly involved in any such scheme.
But Mariottini’s original police report does reveal inconsistencies. He described “a group of statues,” including one with “open arms and one leg in front of the other,” despite only two statues being recovered, neither of which matched that description. He also mentioned a shield, though none was ever found. Mariottini later retracted those details, stopped giving interviews, and disappeared from public view.
A tantalizing clue lies in a notebook recovered from Robert Hecht, an American antiquities dealer indicted for conspiring to traffic in looted antiquities in 2005. There, Hecht kept a shopping list of illicit objects. One entry reads, “Bronze group signed by Pythagoras of Rhegium. 5th century B.C.” (Hecht died in 2012.)
At the Cleveland Museum of Art, a statue called Apollo Sauroktonos, dating to the fourth century B.C., seems to match Mariottini’s original description. And in 1981, an anonymous trafficker told La Stampa that one of the bronzes’ helmets had been sold to the Getty Museum for $6,000. (“I can confirm that we have never had a helmet associated with the Riace Bronzes in our collection,” the museum told Air mail.)
Despite this latest ongoing investigation, the mystery of the Riace bronzes may never be solved. The statues have become a symbol of Calabrian identity, a beacon for the city.
It’s not hard to see why. When I visited the bronzes two weeks ago, crowds waited in the blistering heat outside the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Reggio Calabria. Inside, the statues stood tall on anti-seismic marble in a climate-controlled room.
They pre-date Michelangelo’s David by 2,000 years, yet their musculature and the glint in their black eyes look hauntingly real.
If only they could talk.
Elena Clavarino is the Senior Editor at Air Mail
