Emilio Villa e le uova di Babilonia

Emilio Villa was a multifaceted intellectual – poet, artist, art critic, translator of the Odissey and of the Hebrew Bible. He was also an assyriologist and a semitist. However, both in the field of art and of Oriental studies, he was an independent voice often outside the official culture. Attending the Pontificio Istituto Biblico in Rome he was a student of A. Deimel during the 1930’s and published a translation of the first tablet of the Enuma Elish as well as some other studies in the field of assyriology which remained largely unknown or ignored by the contemporary scientific community. Through the analysis of his assyriological studies as well as of the references or quotations of Mesopotamian culture in his entire intellectual life, the present article aims to reconstruct Emilio Villa’s assyriological formation from a technical point of view - teachers, bibliography and tools – and to place him in the Italian assyriological scholarship of that time.