Giovanni Mariti watched ancient Kition being dismantled for 1760s Larnaca, a 2013 study recounts

The Florentine Giovanni Mariti spent six years in Ottoman Cyprus between 1760 and 1768, trading at first and later serving as chancellor of the British consulate at Larnaca. Luca Bombardieri of the University of Florence follows him in a paper, his lecture of 17 November 2011 to the Accademia dei Georgofili, printed in its Atti in 2013. Bombardieri counts Mariti as both the first Italian traveller to leave an account of the island and its youngest explorer.

In Cyprus the paper dwells on Kition. Mariti put the ancient city at Larnaca, against the long-held belief that it lay at the village of Kiti, and walked the ruins more than once in 1766 with Carsten Niebuhr. Throughout his stay, builders broke up old foundations of large squared blocks to reuse at Larnaca. In 1767 he watched a head of Caracalla come out of the ground with many coins; both went to the British consul Timothy Turner, who sent the head to England. Turner gave Mariti some of the coins, and Mariti passed some on to the museum of the Etruscan Academy of Cortona, although Bombardieri notes that no such lot is in its archaeological collections today. Mariti's 1787 dissertation on Kition carried a map of the main finds he had seen, which Bombardieri sets beside what the Department of Antiquities' excavations have reconstructed since the 1950s.

The paper also covers Mariti's accounts of the mosques of Nicosia and Famagusta and his 1772 treatise on Cypriot wine, Del vino di Cipro.