L’oro di Tharros

This contribution reflects on Tharros as a “romance of archaeology”: a place where nineteenth-century excavation, antiquarian collecting, modern storytelling, and public memory became tightly entangled. Using the emblematic case of 5th Lord Vernon’s 1851 activities in the southern necropolis—and the long afterlife of those discoveries through dispersal, loss of context, and later reconstructions—it frames the “Gold Rush” of Tharros as a laboratory for the history of archaeological practices and mentalities. The essay traces how travel culture, the market, and learned networks shaped what was sought, recorded, and interpreted, and how modern scholarship can recompose fractured evidence while resisting both sensationalism and reductive narratives.