Italy Displays Paintings from an Ancient Etruscan Tomb, Its Latest Cultural Acquisitionhttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5290734-italy-displays-paintings-ancient-etruscan-tomb-its-latest-cultural-acquisition
Italy Displays Paintings from an Ancient Etruscan Tomb, Its Latest Cultural Acquisition
People look at the newly acquired Tomb of Francois, a 4th-century BC masterpiece bought last month by Italy's Culture Ministry for 15 million euros, at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome, Italy, June 30, 2026. (Reuters)
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Italy Displays Paintings from an Ancient Etruscan Tomb, Its Latest Cultural Acquisition
People look at the newly acquired Tomb of Francois, a 4th-century BC masterpiece bought last month by Italy's Culture Ministry for 15 million euros, at the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome, Italy, June 30, 2026. (Reuters)
Italy on Tuesday put on display one of the best-known examples of Etruscan painting, panels from a tomb that it acquired for 15 million euros ($17 million) in the Culture Ministry’s buying spree of big-ticket pieces of the country's cultural heritage.
The ministry announced in May that it had acquired the fresco panels, dating from the 4th century, from members of the Torlonia family, one of Italy’s ancient noble families whose vast collection of antiquity has long been kept out of the public domain.
The Francois Tomb was discovered in 1857 by the French archaeologist Alessandro Francois in Vulci, on land owned by the Torlonia family. The frescoes were detached from the necropolis in 1863 and became part of the Torlonia private collection, while the contents of the tomb were divided up among Francois, colleagues and the family.
The Italian government has been trying to get possession of the tomb since 1921, as part of its effort to bring back into the Italian public patrimony artifacts and antiquities that were acquired or looted during the boom of archaeological excavations in the 1800s and beyond.
The Etruscan Civilization occupied swaths of what is today central Italy for centuries was a major Mediterranean trading power. Much of it was destroyed by the subsequent Roman Empire.
The tomb is opening to the public Wednesday at Rome’s Villa Giulia National Etruscan Museum. Alongside the fresco panels are jewels, Etruscan vases and other items that were discovered inside the tomb, now belong in museum collections around the world and were loaned to Italy for the exhibition.
The tomb marks the Culture Ministry’s third major acquisition this year of expensive, culturally important artworks. It paid $14.9 million for Antonello da Messina’s “Ecce Homo” and around $35 million for a rare portrait by Caravaggio depicting Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII.
The funds have come from the ministry’s annual budget for acquisitions, but Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli has prioritized buying fewer, bigger-ticket items of cultural importance rather than smaller, lesser artworks and antiquities, officials said.
“In recent months, the Ministry of Culture has invested a great deal of money in acquiring masterpieces,” said Massimo Osanna, director general of Italian museums in the ministry.
Giuli has said the tomb is a “fundamental” part of Italian history that was now being returned to the Italian public to enjoy.
Luana Toniolo, director of the Villa Giulia museum, called the tomb one of the greatest masterpieces of antiquity and Etruscan painting, and one of the best preserved. Among other things, the paintings depict the sacrifice of Trojan prisoners and battles of Etruscan heroes.
Sunken Treasures Exhibition Showcases Historic Maps of the Red Seahttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5290690-sunken-treasures-exhibition-showcases-historic-maps-red-sea
Sunken Treasures Exhibition Showcases Historic Maps of the Red Sea
Historic maps of the Red Sea on display at the "Sunken Treasures: The Maritime Heritage of the Red Sea" exhibition. (SPA)
Historic maps of the Red Sea on display at the "Sunken Treasures: The Maritime Heritage of the Red Sea" exhibition document the strategic importance of this vital maritime corridor and reflect how geographers, travelers, and cartographers viewed the region over the centuries.
More than geographical illustrations, the maps serve as historical records of the Red Sea's role as a gateway for trade, pilgrimage, and cultural exchange linking Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Saudi Press Agency said on Tuesday.
Among the exhibits at the Red Sea Museum is a 17th-century map that provides an early depiction of the region. It highlights mapmakers' understanding of the Red Sea's importance as a major maritime route connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean, while illustrating the ports and shipping routes that played a central role in global commerce.
The maps demonstrate how the Red Sea's strategic location made it a hub for economic and cultural exchange. Merchant vessels carrying spices, incense, textiles, and minerals sailed its waters alongside ships transporting pilgrims from across the Islamic world, establishing the Red Sea as one of history's busiest and most influential maritime routes.
The collection also reflects the evolution of geographical and navigational knowledge. Compiled using the expertise of sailors, captains, and travelers, the maps documented coastlines, islands, and ports, serving as essential references for maritime navigation before the advent of modern navigational technologies. They also illustrate the accumulation of scientific knowledge that deepened understanding of the Red Sea's geography and maritime environment.
Historic Jeddah Enriches Visitor Experience with Traditional Crafts and Cultural Activitieshttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5290688-historic-jeddah-enriches-visitor-experience-traditional-crafts-and-cultural
Historic Jeddah Enriches Visitor Experience with Traditional Crafts and Cultural Activities
Historic Jeddah offers immersive cultural experiences through interactive programs that combine learning with hands-on participation. (SPA)
Historic Jeddah offers immersive cultural experiences through interactive programs that combine learning with hands-on participation, enabling visitors to explore local heritage and discover traditional crafts in an environment that blends creativity and education, further strengthening its position as a vibrant cultural destination, the Saudi Press Agency said on Tuesday.
The activities featured a variety of workshops, including handmade bookbinding, mosaic art for children, painting on canvas bags, and crafting perfumes from natural ingredients, providing participants with opportunities to explore diverse artistic materials and techniques.
These activities reflect the concept of a comprehensive cultural experience by going beyond showcasing handicrafts to allowing visitors to observe production processes, interact with artisans, and participate in workshops, educational tours, and community programs, thereby deepening their understanding of traditional crafts and their historical and cultural significance.
The experience presents a model that uses culture to discover both place and people, transforming a visit to Historic Jeddah into an educational journey that extends beyond sightseeing by bringing together heritage, creativity, and community engagement, reinforcing the Kingdom’s cultural identity.
How Some in Palestinian Diaspora Find Connection, Identity and Resilience in Traditional Embroideryhttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5290259-how-some-palestinian-diaspora-find-connection-identity-and-resilience-traditional
A hand-embroidered map of historic Palestine with names of cities and the words “Palestine” and “Returning” in Arabic is displayed at the Inaash Association embroidery workshop in Beirut, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (AP)
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How Some in Palestinian Diaspora Find Connection, Identity and Resilience in Traditional Embroidery
A hand-embroidered map of historic Palestine with names of cities and the words “Palestine” and “Returning” in Arabic is displayed at the Inaash Association embroidery workshop in Beirut, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (AP)
Decades later, Samar Kabouli still fondly recalls gathering with women in her family and sipping cardamom-spiced coffee as they embroidered fabric with colorful threads in traditional Palestinian patterns.
Born in Lebanon to Palestinian refugees, Kabouli had never seen her parents’ homeland. But more than just making pretty designs, the threads in her needle were stitching a connection to her heritage.
It's known as “tatreez,” and Kabouli, 48, started doing the traditional form of Palestinian embroidery in her teens to make money. Besides an economic lifeline, tatreez has provided her with a bridge to the land her parents fled during the 1948 mass displacement that Palestinians call their Nakba, or catastrophe.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes in present day Israel during the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation. Israel refused their return.
Kabouli's work allows her to send a message of resilience, of survival.
“We’re still here,” she said. “All what has been happening in Gaza ... and we’re still standing and we’ll not forget the cause.”
From refugee camps to stitching circles and from museum halls to online classes, many in the Palestinian diaspora communities worldwide engage with tatreez as far more than a decorative aesthetic.
They're finding in it a celebration of cultural heritage, a bridge to their homeland and dispersed communities and — with its myriad embroidered symbols — a visual language of storytelling. To many, refugees or not, it's become a symbol of Palestinian identity and pride, a vehicle for documenting history and a form of resistance.
With the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, some have also used it to raise funds for people there or stitched designs to focus attention on Palestinian suffering in the enclave.
“We had a lot of people who came and they’re like, ‘OK, we want to do a T-shirt with a Gaza chest or we want to do a scarf with the Gaza motif,’” said Ali Jaafar, general manager of Inaash Association, where Kabouli works.
The Lebanese organization provides Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon with much-needed income through tatreez, while also aiming to help preserve and promote the heritage. It sells embroidered fashion, home decor and art pieces, and showcases the art form in exhibitions and museums.
Palestinian weaver Samira Nasser works on a handmade embroidered piece at the Inaash Association embroidery workshop in Beirut, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (AP)
Protecting heritage and ‘struggling through culture’
Efforts to preserve and raise awareness about tatreez in Palestinian communities at home and abroad are part of a larger push to safeguard a heritage and connections to a history and a place that many fear are at risk of being erased.
“Palestinian tatreez is an identity and a document of our presence in every Palestinian village and town," said Maha Saca, founder and director of the Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, adding that old embroidered thobes, or dresses, show the presence of Palestinians in particular locations before the dispersal of many.
“The Palestinian woman has written the story of her village through motifs from her surrounding environment and her beliefs,” Saca said. “We’re struggling through culture and saying we have roots.”
The Palestinian embroidery art form was added in 2021 to UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
In New York, Lina Barkawi, whose small business teaches tatreez, said the “constant fight for liberation and having a Palestinian identity that’s recognized globally is really what has been driving a lot of this documentation.”
Palestinian weaver Samar Kabouli works at the Inaash Association embroidery workshop in Beirut, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (AP)
A generational practice and window into history
In Arabic, tatreez refers to embroidery in general as well as the specific Palestinian form, which is often a social practice taught through generations by grandmothers and mothers. Some seek formal training.
With motifs that Palestinian women had historically adopted from their surroundings, the old embroidered thobes can offer clues through stitched patterns, design and color about facets of a woman's personal story, her environment and regional identity, Saca said.
In the Palestinian context, such connections to time and place, including areas now in Israel, gain added importance as testament to what was, she said. “How do we have a Jaffa thobe if we hadn’t been in Jaffa?" she said. "We write history on our thobes.”
There's also an element of continuity. Her grandmother's embroidered wedding thobe bears the hallmarks of Bethlehem dresses, Saca said. Her own granddaughter's baptism dress included embroideries copied from that dress.
Tatreez also can be political, both through preservation and creation.
“Just being able to have some of the dresses from pre-1948 is a political act,” Barkawi said.
There's also the making of the so-called “intifada thobe” that included embroidered political and Palestinian symbols, such as the flag. It's linked to the “first intifada,” or uprising, which erupted in 1987 against Israel’s occupation and was met with a fierce Israeli response.
Stitching, mourning and documenting
After the war in Gaza, which was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, fashion designer Hama Hinnawi expressed grief through tatreez work. Tatreez is usually colorful, she said. But that was no moment for color.
The result? Black embroidery on black fabric, a statement of mourning for the killings, destruction and displacement in Gaza. She's also experimented with turning some iconic scenes from the war into new embroidery motifs.
“We have a big responsibility on our shoulders to tell this story, not to be buried for the next generations ... through tatreez, through art, through speaking.”
Born in Jordan to Palestinian parents, Hinnawi wanted to bring awareness to heritage through her fashion brand by marrying tatreez with contemporary fashion.
To her, tatreez simply means home. It’s “identity, pride, storytelling,” said Hinnawi, who shuttles between Chicago and Jordan.
She's provided embroidery work opportunities to Palestinian women in refugee camps in Jordan and talked in the US about tatreez. Before the war, she also worked with women in Gaza.
Barkawi runs an online community of Palestinian and non-Palestinian embroiderers, some of whom have created designs sold to raise funds for Gaza families. One incorporates a “water and seeds” motif with an embroidered message to “Feed Gaza Now.”
Members in different countries recreated a tapestry that once hung in a bombed Gaza home, each stitching a part and mailing it to another.
Born in the US to a Palestinian father and Panamanian mother, Barkawi said learning about tatreez deepened her Palestinian identity.
New dresses with woven stories
Embroidering her first thobe took two years. Barkawi incorporated motifs with personal meanings, such as palm trees that represent her name in Arabic. She added orchids, the national flower of Panama, for her mom.
Technically imperfect, it was the perfect dress for her Islamic marriage ceremony.
“I embedded my story as a Palestinian in the diaspora into this dress.”
In Lebanon, Kabouli, too, once dreamed of owning a tatreez piece for her wedding trousseau. She couldn’t afford one.
After their parents died, an older sister had turned to tatreez with Inaash to help support the large family. Kabouli learned from her.
Now a production supervisor at Inaash in Beirut, Kabouli sees her younger self in the women working in refugee camps in Lebanon, many in the south, which was hard hit by the latest Israel-Hezbollah war.
The vibrancy of tatreez often contrasts with harsh living conditions in camps amid employment and other restrictions the refugees face. Contending with power cuts, women, eager to finish a piece and get paid, may work on rooftops to grasp the last ray of sunlight, Jaafar said.
Besides the income, Kabouli said doing tatreez can be grounding, almost meditative.
She has another yearning: to see her parents’ homeland. They came from an area in what’s now Israel.
For now, tatreez provides her with hope.
“I don’t feel like I am far away. I keep working on Palestinian heritage, following the cause,” she said. “It connects me to my homeland, especially since we’re deprived of it.”
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