June 25, 2015 – The National Council of Archaeology of the Ministry of Culture of Albania has approved a project presented by the University of Bologna for the study and excavation of an important religious building in the Hellenistic and Roman city of Butrint, located in the south of the country (anciently known as Epirus), a few kilometers from the border with Greece. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, under the Directorate General for the Promotion of the Country System, provides financial support to the excavations, to which the University of Bologna and its Ravenna Campus contribute by facilitating the participation of students enrolled in courses related to the preservation of cultural heritage. In Butrint, Luigi Ugolini had already conducted very fruitful research between the 1920s and 1930s. Then the Second World War put an end to those activities, later resumed by Albanian, British and American archaeologists. Archaeologists from the Archaeology Section in the Department of Culture Civilization History of the University of Bologna, in perfect continuity with past research, return today to this site, visited by tens of thousands of tourists every year thanks to the cruise ships sailing in the Ionian Sea near the island of Corfu. The excavation mission of the University of Bologna is headed by Sandro De Maria, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the Department of History, Cultures and Civilizations, who for the past fifteen years has been working with his staff in another important Albanian archaeological site – Phoinike (Phoenix) – a city founded in the IV century BC and abandoned at the time of the Turkish conquest of Albania, in the first half of the 16th century. (Red)
