Classical pottery in collection: the MemO Project and the recreation of a 'context'

Heir to a centuries-old tradition, the phenomenon of collecting ancient pottery, especially Greek and Southern-Italian, is still particularly active, and denoting a still lively adherence to classical taste. The materials of these collections, however, often appear decontextualized, that is to say deprived of their fundamental informative component. Since 2018, through a multidisciplinary approach, the MemO Project, directed by the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Padova, has dealt with the study of these materials in order to reconstruct their history and origin, i.e. to systematically recount their memory. This contribution intends to analyze the complexity of the narration of the archaeological data for the contextualized material and, above all, to detect its informative potential in order to recreate the original context. Through a multidisciplinary teamwork, we intend to present the results obtained in the context of the reconstruction of the history of inevitably inaccessible materials.