Schliemann’s methodology

Schliemann, the famous archaeologist, acquired an excellent command of several languages through his personal method consisting of a reduced study of grammar and an increased application of practice: reading, repeating, writing and learning by heart. This method is not that obsolete, considering the most recent findings of neuroscience. Memory fixation is based on preferential pathways, called traces that are determined by new perceptions but also by repetition. We propose a new method for language learning and teaching at university level, which would be founded not only on visual skills, but also on manual writing in order to maximise neuronal traces.

In 1858 Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) made his first trip to Italy as a tourist and businessman. He was not yet the famous person that the world would celebrate as the discoverer of Troy. He would return in the years that followed, travelling all over the peninsula, from Emilia to Sicily and Sardinia, on the strength of the glory that the scientific environment bestowed on him and with the wealth accumulated thanks to profitable commercial activities in Russia and the United States. What was the relationship between the German scholar and Italy? What were his contacts with national academic circles, but also with personalities from the world of politics and culture? The book reconstructs, through the study of letters and personal diaries preserved in the Schliemann Fund of the Gennadius Library in Athens, together with other Italian archival sources presented for the first time, the thirty-year system of relations between the discoverer of Troy and Italy.