Pigorini and modern archaeology

In the second half of the 19th century, immediately after the Unification of Italy, paleoethnology, or Italian prehistoric archaeology, was born between Parma and Reggio Emilia.
In 1861, Pellegrino Strobel, a professor of Natural History at the University of Parma, and Luigi Pigorini, a young volunteer at the Museum of Antiquities, in the wake of the research underway in the lakes and peat bogs of Switzerland and northern Italy, began their investigations into the “marniere,” the remains of Bronze Age villages typical of the Po Valley, which they called terremare. Soon, and with equal enthusiasm for such research, Don Gaetano Chierici, a priest, teacher, and archaeologist from Reggio, joined them.
While Strobel and Chierici, although very busy with palethnological research and studies, maintained their professions, Pigorini, still a young student at the time of the birth of the new science, was able to devote himself to it full time, thus obtaining the first official assignments related to this discipline: he was entrusted with the creation of a National Prehistoric Museum in Rome and shortly after, again in Rome, the first Italian chair of Palethnology.
His influence on the Italian scientific panorama would become so significant as to probably contribute to the disinterest towards prehistoric archaeology that emerged, after his death, in the 1920s.