Una produzione “ellenistica” in norditalia: imitazioni di "Herzblattlampen" pergamene

Towards the end of the 1st c. BC made their appearance in Northern Italy the earliest productions of mould-made lamps. Such lamps soon replaced the typical Italian black-slip, wheel-made lamps. It is well known that the mould technology came from the Eastern Mediterranean coasts, in particular from the Hellenistic world, where it had been in use long since. The Hellenistic productions were characterised by high qualitative and aesthetic standards, and by a large variety of shapes and decorations. Together with the new techniques, Northern Italy also took on shapes and models of the most common Hellenistic lamps, thus creating a specific typology which re-elaborated (with different levels of originality) them. The new productions have a huge amount of variants which, at the present, cannot be considered wholly known and classified. The aim of this paper is to give a report of new findings from recent excavations carried out in northern Italy, which we believe have provided important data in order to improve our knowledge of this typology. In particular, we are going to present complete - or anyway well preserved – lamps found in stratigraphic excavations: the contexts they were found in can help to punctuate the chronology of these lamps, whereas the objects integrally preserved, with their sometimes unusual morphological characters, might lead to the definition of new, so far unknown variants. Finally, these findings supply new data about the distribution of the lamps, both with regard to the extent of the geographic area they circulated in, and to ways and modalities of trade they followed.