<p align="justify" style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">The International Center for the Study of the Herculaneum Papyri (C.I.S.P.E.) was founded in Naples in 1969 on the initiative of Prof. Marcello Gigante, who became its Secretary. The President was Prof. Vittorio De Falco, and its members were the most famous scholars working on texts from Herculaneum, including Bruno Snell, Reinhold Merkelbach, and Wolfgang Schmid. The current President is Prof. Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, while Prof. Gigante is Vice-President, and Prof. Francesca Longo Auricchio is Secretary; alongside a number of well-known Italian and foreign scholars, the Center's <em>ex officio </em>members are the Dean of the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the University of Naples 'Federico II', the Director of the National Library 'Vittorio Emanuele III' of Naples, the Director of the Officina dei papiri ercolanesi, the Director of the Istituto di Patologia del libro, and the Archaeological Superintendent of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The legal home of the C.I.S.P.E. is the Department of Classical Philology 'Francesco Arnaldi' of the University of Naples 'Federico II'. </font></p> <p align="justify" style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">The C.I.S.P.E. was formed with the dual purpose of working toward the resumption of the excavation of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum and of promoting the renewal of studies on the texts of Herculaneum, which are now housed in the Officina dei Papiri of the National Library 'Vittorio Emanuele III' of Naples. </font></p> <p align="justify" style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">It is well known that the papyri were discovered, beginning in 1752, by workmen of the Bourbon royal family in the Herculanean Villa which probably belonged to the Roman family of the Pisos. At that time the building had been entered only via well-shafts and tunnels, and it was never uncovered; for this reason scholars are now pressing for a complete excavation which, they hope, will yield further texts and works of art which had escaped the eighteenth-century exploration. In 1986 the Archaeological Superintendency of Pompeii began a new exploration of the Villa, starting with identifying and precisely locating the old wells dating from the Bourbon era, and preparing for a genuine modern excavation. The excavation of the Western zone of Herculaneum, between the city and the Villa, has got under way, and has brought to light part of the atrium, and has also revealed that the building includes more storeys, at least three, which underlie the part already known and which were not explored in the eighteenth century. </font></p> <p align="justify" style="margin-top:0;margin-bottom:0;"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Beginning in 1970 the C.I.S.P.E. has awarded scholarships to Italian and foreign researchers who wanted to work on Herculanean texts. We can say that a generation of young, and less young, scholars has had experience of these papyri: from the Japanese Eiko Kondo, who inaugurated the series, to David Sedley, Claire Millot, Annick Monet, Daniel Delattre, Simon Laursen, Edeltraud Dürr, Jürgen Hammerstaedt, Jeffrey Fish, and Kirk Sanders; and also many mature scholars, such as Albert Henrichs, Richard Janko, Dirk Obbink, Elizabeth Asmis, David Armstrong, Jim Porter, David Blank, and Catherine Atherton (one could cite even more of them, and the many Italians and Neapolitans also not listed here). </font></p>
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