Antonio Vondiziano

Antonio Vondiziano held the British vice-consulship at Larnaca for almost forty years, and the ancient cemetery lay in his own garden. He was born in Cephalonia in 1753 and came to Cyprus as a baby; he became a merchant and freeman of the Levant Company and was British vice-consul from 1799^1,2. Hadjicosti, following Koudounaris, calls his post Chancellor of the English consulate⁶. His wife was Thecla Karydi, and when W. Turner stayed with him in March 1815 he found "a wife and five daughters" and a large house with six servants^5,7. In 1827 he adopted his nephew Nicolaos from Cephalonia and gave him the Ormideia estate⁶.

On 21 November 1838 he guided the American missionary Lorenzo Pease around the cemetery in his garden. Two sarcophagi stood above ground; both had been opened and their grave goods removed. He gave Pease a tear bottle¹. He was ill with a hernia and died at Larnaca on 17 December 1838, less than a month later¹.

Ludwig Ross, who was in Cyprus in 1845, reported that the bronze head of Apollo found in the dry river bed at Tamassos in the summer of 1836 passed into the hands of "a Herr Wondiziano in Larnaka", who sold it for 1,800 piastres to Herr Borrell in Smyrna⁴. Ross gives no forename. Robert Merrillees lists Antonio, his younger brother Andreas and Andreas's son Petros Pavlos as the candidates and considers Antonio the more likely¹. Henry Perigal Borrell sold the head to the Duke of Devonshire in March 1839, three months after Antonio's death¹. It is now in the British Museum (GR 1958,0418.1)¹.