Landscape archaeology, photography, and friendship: Dora and Agnes Bulwer, Thomas Ashby, and Rodolfo Lanciani

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the talented British photographers, Dora and Agnes Bulwer, travelled to sites of historical significance throughout Italy. Their photographs reveal their fascination with the Italian countryside, its people, and the remains of Italy’s past. As members of the British and American Archaeological Society of Rome and friends of leading archaeologists, Rodolfo Lanciani and Thomas Ashby, the sisters photographed landscapes, towns, archaeological remains, and historic monuments. Many of these sites have since been irrevocably transformed, primarily due to development in post-unitarian Italy. As such, the photographs are now significant cultural, environmental, and archaeological heritage records. This article investigates the working relationship between Ashby, Lanciani, and the Bulwer sisters (particularly Dora), and demonstrates the high regard these prominent archaeologists had for the sisters and their photographs. It argues that Dora and Agnes intended to create visual documentary records of Italy’s urban, rural, and archaeological landscapes, and highlights the vital photographic fieldwork conducted by women in Italy during the Victorian era. The article addresses the fact that, despite Dora and Agnes’ important visual contribution to archaeological and cultural landscape studies in post-unitarian Italy, their photographs have been largely, and unjustly, underexplored by subsequent archaeologists and cultural landscape historians.