ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the twentieth century Italian culture was dominated by positivist thought which saw the experimental method as the only valid approach to scientific research. Giacomo Boni is the director of the excavations in the Roman Forum and on the Palatine from 1902; he undertook the excavations of the protohistorical cemetery of the Forum, accurately documenting all aspects of the burial place. Many of Giacomo Boni's characteristics came together in the person of Paolo Orsi, another great archaeologist who dominated the scene in southern Italy and Sicily during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli trained in Central Europe, he had begun his scientific career at the beginning of the fascist period. He had no desire to be a theoretician of culture, nor would he have accepted being identified with one particular school or rigid philosophical position.
