Review of Lost Worlds in Journal of Greek Archaeology 7 (2022), pp. 518-522 by Stefano Struffolino

“This volume reconstructs the fascinating vicissitudes of a prodigious young man and his adventures in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean between the years 1921 and 1924. …

Ian Begg highlights very well the intellectual and character traits that made this 21-year-old man a privileged interlocutor of the highest archaeological figures who resided in Greece at that time, but also a frequent visitor to high-ranking salons in which the intricacies of politics were discussed in a country that was going through a very delicate period.

The numerous epistles that Gilbert assiduously sent to his mother Florence, preserved at the University of Trent, in Peterborough, Ontario, meticulously studied by the author of this book, appear as a whole not only as a travel diary but also as an acute examination of contemporary events and of the debate, then at its highest levels, between royalists and Venizelists. The unprecedented point of view is that of an intelligent dandy, a lover of social life who did not disdain to combine profound discourses on the country’s past and present culture with receptions, gala dinners or invitations for a tea or a whisky and soda in the halls of the prestigious Hotel Grande Bretagne.

A strength of this book is the deep and precise contemporary historical reconstruction   that Ian Begg offers to the reader, often leaving the word to Bagnani and his letters, in a tangle of names and exponents of noble families about whom precise details are given in the text or in footnotes. …

As is still the case today for trainees at the Italian Archaeological School in Athens, their stay included (at the time only for men) trips throughout Greece, to Crete and the Aegean islands.  And here Gilbert transforms himself from a snobbish dandy to the perfect archaeologist, ready to adapt to the most extreme situations. Many of his epistolary accounts are not so far from the travel accounts of the 19th century  European  explorers,  although  his  view  of  the monuments takes on a much more mature and subtle objective and descriptive force. …

On the background of the adventurous events of the young archaeologist passionate about contemporary politics, the reader immediately perceives how in this volume (starting from the cover image) one can grasp the dramatic escalation that led to the tragic events in Smyrna of 13 September 1922. …

After a break in Rome, Gilbert Bagnani, reappointed to   the   Athens   School   together   with   Doro   Levi   for a second year, found himself in a profoundly changed country. What is now   considered by many scholars  to  be  the  genocide  of  the  Greeks  of  Anatolia,  along  with  those  of  Pontus,  will  have  as  its first consequence the outpouring of a huge mass of  refugees  towards  mainland  Greece  as  well  as  the  abdication  of  King  Constantine  and  his  formal  replacement  by  his  son  George  II,  who  was  in  fact  a  hostage  in  his  residence  while  power  was  in  the  hands  of  the  military  led  by  Colonels  Gonatas  and  Plastiras.  Many of Bagnani’s old royalist friends were imprisoned, but he continued his work as a reporter by frequently visiting them in their cells. …

A serious and punctilious archaeologist, culturally open to the investigation of other historical periods, an able journalistic correspondent, an incurable salon-lover and admirer of luxury, gifted with an intelligent sense of irony, even a secret agent. Gilbert Bagnani’s multifaceted personality emerges very well from the pages of Ian Begg’s book, which takes us not only through the history of Greece in the 1920s but also through that of the Archaeological Schools and of the Italian one in particular. For  those who, like the writer of this review, were also students at the SAIA (in 2019 and at a much higher age  than  Gilbert  was),  certain  aspects  of  the  social  life  described  in  this  book  may  remind  us  of  some  characteristic moments of Athenian life: the lectures at  the  other  Schools,  the  buffets,  some  chats  with  colleagues  and  perhaps  even  with  professors  and  directors,  but  nothing  compared  to  the  levels  that  this very young Italo-Canadian, endowed with great abilities and helped by an uncommon academic and family heritage, was able to reach in those two years. …

When Gilbert Bagnani is involved, connections are never coincidences.” 

For Stefano Struffolino’s complete review, please go to https://archaeopresspublishing.com/ojs/index.php/JGA/article/view/1739/1393