Giovanni Mariti

In 1767 Giovanni Mariti watched workmen quarrying stone at Kition turn up a white marble head of Caracalla and many Greek Imperial coins reading KOINON KYPRION. The head passed to Timothy Turner, British consul in Cyprus, and Mariti presented some of the coins to the museum of the Etruscan Academy at Cortona, as he wrote in his own account¹.

According to the introduction to the English translation, Mariti reached Cyprus from Leghorn on 2 February 1760, served for some years as an official of the Imperial and Tuscan consulates, and left for Florence on 6 October 1767¹. He wrote that many curious antiquities used to be found at Kouklia, especially in tombs, but that the Turks now regarded excavation with jealousy¹. He also recorded that Carsten Niebuhr took copies of the St Lazarus inscriptions to Turner in 1766 and that Turner thought them Armenian, a view Mariti shared after seeing the originals many times¹.

His Viaggi per l'isola di Cipro appeared at Lucca in 1769; C. D. Cobham translated it in 1909 as Travels in the Island of Cyprus¹. Luigi Palma di Cesnola lists Mariti among the authorities he consulted⁵, and Vassos Karageorghis uses Mariti's plan of the walls and harbour of Kition⁴. Wikidata gives his dates as born in Florence on 4 November 1736 and died there on 13 September 1806².