Golasecca culture

The Golasecca culture (9th - 4th century BC) was a Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age culture in northern Italy, whose type-site was excavated at Golasecca in the province of Varese, Lombardy, where, in the area of Monsorino at the beginning of 19th century, Abbot Giovanni Battista Giani made the first findings of about fifty graves with pottery and metal objects.

The culture's material evidence is scattered over a wide area of 20,000 km² south of the Alps, between the rivers Po, Serio and Sesia, and bordered on the north by the Alpine passes.

The name of the Golasecca culture comes from the first findings that were discovered from excavations conducted from 1822 at several locations in the Comune of Golasecca, by the antiquarian abbot Father Giovanni Battista Giani (1788–1857), who misidentified the clearly non-Roman burials as remains of the Battle of Ticinus of 218 BC between Hannibal and Scipio Africanus. Most of the inventoried objects were from different graves located in the areas of Sesto Calende, Golasecca and Castelletto sopra Ticino. Giani published a first report in 1824, but he misinterpreted the findings, attributing them to a Roman population from the 4th century BC.

In 1865 Louis Laurent Gabriel de Mortillet, a founder of European archaeology, rightly assigned the same tombs to a pre-Roman culture of the early Iron Age, with a likely Celtic substratum given the similarities with the Hallstatt Culture. He made several trips there bringing back to France part of the Abbot Giani's collection to enrich the Musée des Antiquités Nationales collections, of which he was Vice-curator.

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