Father Delattre"s Correspondence and the History of Christian Archaeology in the Maghreb: His Correspondence with Giovanni Battista de Rossi in 1885=La correspondance du père Delattre et l'histoirede l'archéologie chrétienne au Maghreb: La correspondance avecGiovanni Battista de Rossi en 1885

The contribution presents five unpublished letters from Father Alfred Louis Delattre’s correspondence kept at the Central Archives of the Missionaries of Africa/White Fathers in Rome. This essay is part of a wider study, carried out over a longer period, on the development of Christian archaeology in the Mediterranean, always leading with special attention to archive documents. The letters of Fr. Delattre preserved in the aforementioned Archive are numerous, well known but not all have been well studied by scholars in recent years. For this text, I will focus on a group of these letters, related to the contacts made by Fr. Delattre with Giovanni Battista de Rossi, the main Christian archaeologist from Rome in the late XIXth century. These texts are useful to understand the formation of Delattre’s ideas and the influences Roman excavations had on him during his work for the promotion of the discipline of Christian archaeology in the Maghreb and the musealization of early Christian finds in his museum in Tunis. In fact, the aim is not solely to present many original texts by Delattre, contributing to the knowledge of his epistolary, which is a mine of information for archaeological studies in North Africa. Additionally, it will examine his research and discoveries of Christian archaeology in a wider frame, and offer a solid documentary basis for those who will deal in the future with Christian antiquities in the Maghreb.

Overview