Un nuovo caso di sarcofago reimpiegato nella Pisa del Tardo Medioevo

The stripping of ancient monuments and the reuse of parts of them in new buildings with the aim of recovering symbols of Antiquity and making them their own, is a widespread phenomenon in the Middle Ages and in the following centuries. In Pisa, however, the medieval re-employment of roman sarcophagi for the burial of the notables of the city is a very peculiar case for the widespread use that was made between the 12th and 15th centuries. Studies starting with the Colloquium on the reuse of Roman sarcophagi in the Middle Ages (Pisa 1982) provided answers to questions such as: ‘why re-employment?’, ‘When?’, ‘How?’, ‘For whom?’. But there is another question, which concerns the ‘visibility’ of re-employment, on which still has not been sufficiently reflected, also because most of the sarcophagi reused in Pisa, over the centuries have been removed from their original locations and moved to the monumental Camposanto: of them we know the church of origin, but rarely the exact location in it. The recent discovery of a sarcophagus reused in the 13th century in the cemetery of the church of Santa Maria Vergine - excavated in the area where today is the Palazzo della Sapienza, the seat of the Uni- versity of Pisa - now provides new insights on the topic of visibility of the re-used sarcophagi, widening the known cases.