Of all the bronze statuary ancient Greece produced, and it produced a great deal, a handful of pieces has come down to us. Bronze can be melted down, and for two thousand years it was: statues, portraits and sanctuary dedications went back into circulation as weapons, bells and coins.
Almost the only survivals are the ones the sea took away from people first. That is the case with these two, which lay on the seabed off Riace Marina because the ship carrying them never arrived.
The result is that in Reggio Calabria you walk into a room and stand in front of two Greek bodies of the fifth century BC, whole, with their eyes, their teeth and their lips still in place. It is not an experience you can have in many other places on earth.
Careful: the Bronzes room has timed entry and a number of scheduled closure days. It is worth checking the museum’s calendar before you travel, because it is the one way to get the visit completely wrong.
Why they are an exception, not one masterpiece among many
What makes these two different from any other ancient statue you have seen in a museum? The material, and therefore the number of survivors.
The rooms of classical sculpture you walk through in Rome, in Naples or at the Louvre are almost all Roman marble copies of Greek bronze originals. Marble survived because it is worthless to melt; bronze is not. The large Greek bronze originals that reached us intact number a few dozen in the whole world, and almost all of them came out of water: from the sea off Riace, from Antikythera, from Cape Artemision.
So when you look at them, you are not looking at a version of a lost original. You are looking at the original, with the surface the artist worked and the precious-metal parts he chose himself.
16 August 1972, and who pulled them out
The discovery is not to the credit of an excavation campaign: it is to the credit of a swimmer.
On 16 August 1972, off Riace Marina, Stefano Mariottini, a chemist from Rome on holiday who was free diving, noticed about two hundred metres from shore and eight metres down what looked like a human arm sticking out of the sand. It was not a body: it was the left arm of Bronze A. A little further on lay the second.
What were they doing there? The simplest answer is also the likeliest: they were cargo. A ship carrying statues, perhaps towards Rome, perhaps towards a workshop that would reuse them, lost or lightened its load at that point in the Ionian Sea. No hull has been found, so the story stops there, and that should be said rather than filled in to taste.
Bronze A, the one with the silver teeth
The first of the two, 198 centimetres tall, is the more famous, and the reason lies in two details you only see close up.
The lips are copper, a metal redder than bronze, and so are the nipples: they gave the colour of living skin where colour counts. Between the parted lips you can make out the silver teeth. The eyes are built in layers, the white in limestone and the iris in glass paste, and they are the reason this face looks at you instead of staying still.
The pose is what the textbooks call contrapposto: the right leg carries the weight, the left is free, the hips tilt one way and the shoulders the other. It is the invention that in the fifth century BC took the frontal stiffness out of Greek statues, and here you see it working on a whole body.
Bronze B, and the missing eye
The second, 197 centimetres tall, is the one visitors look at second and remember more, for a reason that is not aesthetic.
His right eye is gone. The socket is empty, and the emptiness changes the whole face: where A stares at you, B seems to look past you. It is not the sculptor’s choice, it is a loss, but it is also the detail that says better than any label that these objects spent twenty-four centuries without us.
The other difference is on the head: B wears a skullcap, a close-fitting cap that almost certainly supported a helmet pushed back on the forehead, lost today along with the weapons both men held.
Analysis has shown that the two statues were built with different internal procedures. They therefore came from two hands, or two workshops, and current dating separates them by a few decades: A around 460 BC, B around 430.
How they were made
The technique is indirect lost-wax casting, and it is the point where archaeology turns into the history of labour.
The model is built in clay, a mould is taken from it, a thin layer of wax is spread over the mould, and the wax is enclosed between the outer form and an inner core of earth. Then you heat it: the wax runs out and the molten bronze takes exactly its place. The thickness of the statue is the thickness that wax had, a few millimetres, which is why a two-metre figure weighs one hundred and sixty kilos today instead of a tonne. When it was found it weighed around four hundred, because the earth core was still inside.
A body like this is not poured in one piece. Head, arms, legs and torso are cast separately and then joined by flow welding, pouring more liquid bronze into the joints. In Bronze A, the radiographs taken during restoration made it possible to read those joints and the casting flaws one by one, in other words to look inside the object without opening it.
Who are they? The honest answer is that we do not know
Here it is worth distrusting anyone who tells you with confidence, because this is the question research has not closed.
The proposals that have circulated over fifty years are many: two of the eponymous heroes of Athens, two of the Seven against Thebes, a group of warriors offered to a sanctuary by a city of Magna Graecia. None has won, because the inscription, the excavation context and the ship are all missing.
What can be said is that they were two figures from a larger group, designed to be seen from a fixed point, probably in a sanctuary: the twist of the heads says so, and so does the fact that the arms held a shield and a weapon. They were not ornaments, they were a political statement in precious metal.
Forty years of restoration, and an alarm in 2026
The modern history of the Bronzes is almost as long as their fame, and it explains why the room is visited the way it is.
The first serious intervention took place in Florence between 1975 and 1980, in the laboratory of the Tuscan heritage authority. At the end of that work, on 15 December 1980, the two statues went on public display for the first time: the Florence exhibition ran until June 1981 and became a social phenomenon, with queues no Italian archaeological show had ever seen. In the summer of 1981 they also passed through the Quirinale as guests of President Sandro Pertini, and only afterwards returned to Reggio.
The second restoration, from 2009 to 2013, took place at Palazzo Campanella, the seat of the regional council, and worked mainly on the inside: the casting earth left within the bodies was removed and analysed. The statues came back to the museum on the night of 21 December 2013, and since then they have stood on anti-seismic marble bases, two blocks separated by spheres which in an earthquake slide and absorb the movement of the ground.
In May 2026 several scholars publicly reported that this system of bases had been compromised, and with it the control of temperature and humidity in the room. The museum’s strategic plan provides for the room to be rebuilt and the bases upgraded, but at the date of this article the work is still waiting for funding. It is news to keep in mind, not a reason to postpone the visit.
Practical information
Details checked on 6 September 2026 on the records of CoopCulture, which runs the ticket office, cross-checked with the pages of the Ministry of Culture, because the museum’s own site refuses automated requests. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel.
Where they are. The Bronzes are at the National Archaeological Museum of Reggio Calabria, at piazza De Nava 26, on the last level of the route, level D. There is no ticket for the Bronzes alone: you enter the museum and reach them at the end.
Tickets. Full price costs 10 euros. The reduced ticket costs 2 euros and is for European Union citizens aged 18 to 25. Entry is free for under-18s, and free for everyone on the first Sunday of the month.
Hours. The museum opens Tuesday to Sunday 9:00-20:00 and last entry is at 19:30. Closed on Mondays.
How entry to the room works. You go in in small groups and in timed slots, so as not to disturb the microclimate and to limit vibration. On busy days that can mean waiting, so do not save the Bronzes for the last twenty minutes before closing.
Careful: the room closes on certain scheduled dates, announced by the museum and also printed on tickets sold online. Anyone holding a ticket for one of those days can come back to see the room within thirty days.
How long it takes. The Bronzes room alone takes twenty minutes, and that is the right amount: they are two objects and you need to walk around them. The whole museum takes three hours.
What to see immediately afterwards
Walking out of the room and leaving is the commonest mistake made in this museum, because level D also holds the two bronze heads recovered off Porticello, which are the other underwater find from this sea.
The museum’s full route, level by level, is in the article on the Magna Graecia archaeological museum, which also explains which masterpieces are out on loan at the moment. For the rest of the city, my guide on what to see in Reggio Calabria lays out the stops, and painting is a few steps from here, at the Civic Art Gallery.
Photographs: the Bronzes room and the details of the two statues by Benjamin Smith (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
