The Riace bronzes (Italian: Bronzi di Riace, ), also called the Riace Warriors, are two full-size Greek bronze statues conventionally designated Statue A (the "Young") and Statue B (the "Old"). They depict two nude, bearded men standing slightly over life size; they originally carried weapons and wore headgear that is now lost. They were cast by the lost-wax process and include materials other than bronze in the eyes, lips and other details. The Riace bronzes are among the few surviving originals of large-scale Greek bronze statuary from the 5th century BC. Statue A is generally dated to around 460 BC and Statue B to around 430 BC.
The two statues were found in the sea on 16 August 1972 off Riace Marina, in the Metropolitan City of Reggio Calabria. They are kept in the Museo Nazionale della Magna Grecia in Reggio Calabria.
Their ancient setting and the monument for which they were made are unknown; there is no agreement on the identity of the figures, their provenance or their makers. Although they were found together, most scholars consider them to have been made by different artists at least two decades apart, and it has not been established whether they originally belonged to the same statuary group.
History Bronze statuary in the 5th century BC
The Riace bronzes are generally regarded as Greek originals of large-scale 5th-century BC bronze statuary rather than Roman-period copies. By the 5th century BC bronze had become the preferred material for full-length Greek statuary. Between the end of the Archaic period and the Classical period, hollow lost-wax casting gradually replaced the construction of large figures from assembled sheets of hammered metal and made it possible to cast life-size statues in separate parts that were subsequently joined. Very little of this production survives: with few exceptions, ancient bronze statues were lost or melted down for their metal, and the appearance of many famous Greek originals is known mainly through Roman marble copies.
A tradition of bronze sculpture also existed in Southern Italy and Sicily, from which few originals survive; schools of bronze workers were active at Rhegion and Crotone from the late 6th century BC and especially during the first half of the 5th century BC. Klearchos and Pythagoras of Rhegion, to whom the tradition assigns a role in the formal development of the Severe style, worked at Rhegion, while the sculptor Patrokles and the bronze worker Dameas worked at Croton; Dameas was active in the second half of the 6th century BC and made the statue of the athlete Milo of Croton described by Pausanias at Olympia. No surviving original can be securely attributed to Pythagoras. The presence of these bronze-working schools is not sufficient to establish where the Riace statues were made, and their provenance remains uncertain. The two statues also differ stylistically: A has features of the Severe style, while B shows elements associated with the tradition of Polykleitos. A 5th-century BC date is also compatible with radiocarbon dating of the organic components of the casting cores, although the tests do not allow a narrower chronology.
Discovery
On 16 August 1972 Stefano Mariottini, while freediving in the waters off Riace Marina, saw part of a dark-coloured shoulder projecting from the sand; after touching it he recognized the material as bronze and began clearing the sand from a human figure lying on its right side. During his dives he noticed, about one metre from the first statue, a big toe and a knee barely emerging from the sand, and thus located a second statue lying on its back beneath a thin layer of sediment. The two statues lay a short distance apart near the submerged reef of Porto Forticchio, in the Agranci district, about 220 metres from the shoreline. In his account published in 2009, Mariottini recalled a seabed about 6 metres deep, whereas the report filed on 17 August 1972 recorded a depth of about 10 metres. The distances and topographical references in the report of the underwater unit of the Messina Carabinieri Legion are, however, approximate. No photographs or films are known of the statues in their position on the seabed before recovery.
Mariottini left the line of a marker buoy tied to the arm of the first statue and, with the help of relatives and friends, managed to locate superintendent Giuseppe Foti at his home in Reggio Calabria. Returning by boat to Riace on the afternoon of 16 August, he took bearings on land and completely covered the two statues with sand to protect them. On 17 August he went to the museum in Reggio Calabria, where he delivered a written report to Foti; Foti arranged the recovery and notified the Carabinieri divers group in Messina. The group was then in Syracuse assisting an attempt by Enzo Maiorca to set a freediving record and could not intervene at Riace until 21 August. Foti also instructed Enrico Natoli to carry out an underwater survey of the site and entrusted a letter to be delivered to the Guardia di Finanza so that the area could be watched. Recovery operations began on 21 August. Statue B was recovered on 21 August and Statue A on 22 August. During the recovery, Statue A fell back to the seabed before being brought ashore. Photographs and film footage of the operations document the use of underwater lifting bags to raise the statues. On the beach the statues were laid on improvised wooden and foam-rubber beds and then transported on a Carabinieri van.
A film reconstruction of the recovery was made at Briatico using two fiberglass copies. It was produced for the RAI series Nel mare degli antichi in 1986 and directed by Pippo Cappellano.
The official report filed on 17 August 1972 as protocol no. 2232 with the Superintendency of Antiquities of Calabria in Reggio states:
On the left side of the typewritten report is a handwritten note in red signed by Giuseppe Foti:
Subsequent underwater searches
Searches by Carabinieri divers continued until 23 August 1972 to establish whether other material was present. No further finds were reported. On 18 November 1972 the Centro Sperimentale di Archeologia Sottomarina of the Istituto di Studi Liguri attempted a survey of the seabed, but weather conditions forced the operation to be abandoned; during the visit the find area was nevertheless located and marked with Mariottini's assistance. From 28 August to 4 September 1973 Nino Lamboglia directed an eight-day campaign from the vessel Cycnulus, searching for remains of a possible shipwreck and other finds connected with the statues. The excavation covered an area of 26 by 6.50 metres. It reached a depth of about one metre; above the natural clay, Lamboglia distinguished a layer of fine sand, a gravel layer about 10–20 cm thick and an upper layer of coarse sand. In the gravel layer that had covered the face of Statue A, 28 lead rings about 6–7 cm in diameter and a fragment of a shield grip were found. Some amphora fragments found beneath the armpit of Statue A were regarded by Lamboglia as material carried by sea currents and unrelated to the statues. The 1973 campaign found no remains of a vessel that could be connected with the transport of the bronzes. Lamboglia proposed that any wreck might have been carried elsewhere by currents while the statues remained in the find area.
In 1981 Alice Freschi directed a second campaign in the same area, entrusted to the Aquarius cooperative. Pottery fragments, chiefly amphora fragments, were recovered together with a piece of keel fitted with two bronze through-pins and dated to the Roman period. Between April and May 2024 a research campaign at Porto Forticchio lasted 32 days. On 6 November 2024 the Italian Ministry of Culture announced the resumption of underwater archaeological excavation, coordinated by a Ministry archaeologist with support from the Messina Carabinieri underwater unit; instrumental surveys carried out in October 2022 and spring 2024 were followed by removal of sediment with a water dredge. In a 2026 study Rosolino Cirrincione and co-authors reviewed the results of the 1973, 1981 and 2024 campaigns, noting that no traces of a shipwreck had been found in the Riace area, and interpreted the 28 lead rings, initially associated with ship equipment, as elements of fishing nets that had become caught among the rocks.
Alternative hypotheses about the discovery Priority in reporting the 1972 discovery became the subject of legal proceedings. Giuseppe Braghò reported that four young men from Riace, Cosimo and Antonio Alì, Domenico Campagna and Giuseppe Sgrò, claimed from the outset to have discovered the statues before Mariottini. Sky TG24 reported that on 17 August the four filed a report before Mariottini's written declaration and that in 1977 the Court of Rome awarded Mariottini a finder's reward of 125 million lire, also taking account of Giuseppe Foti's note about the telephone call received at 21:00 on 16 August. Rebaudo instead identifies the Court of Reggio Calabria as the deciding court, without giving the date of the decision or the amount of the award in that passage. In 2024 Mariottini stated that no appeal was filed after the first-instance decision. In 2005, after consulting reports held by the Superintendency and other historical documentation on the discovery in the historical archive of the archaeological museum in Reggio Calabria, Braghò proposed that the 1972 records indicated a third statue and attributes such as shields, helmets and spears that were not recovered with the two bronzes. He drew particular attention to the phrase "a group of statues" in Mariottini's report and to the description of a figure with open arms and one leg advanced. Mariottini rejected the hypothesis of a third statue in 2024, stating that he had reported only the two bronzes he saw on 16 August 1972.
In 2000 R. Ross Holloway repeated a story according to which divers had found the statues off Sicily and intended to sell them abroad; after the transfer was interrupted, they were supposedly hidden by the submerged reef at Riace for later recovery. Holloway placed both the alleged first discovery in Sicily and the transfer of the statues to Calabria in the 20th century.
On 6 May 2025 the public prosecutor's office in Syracuse opened a case file, with no suspects under investigation, to reconstruct events alleged to have taken place in 1971 off Brucoli, where, according to the hypothesis being examined, the bronzes had been found before the discovery reported at Riace. According to ANSA, Mimmo Bertoni said that in 1971, when he was ten years old, he saw four covered statues being transferred from a small boat to a larger one and recognized a spear, helmet and shield on one of them. In an interview published the same year in Archeologia Viva, Bertoni instead spoke of five statues loaded by divers; he also said that he had been ten years old at the time and that among the shapes he had seen a helmeted head, a shield and several spears. In May 2025 several newsrooms anonymously received a photograph said to show a bronze statue about two metres high, similar to Statue A, supported by two divers with Brucoli in the background. In 2026 Cirrincione and co-authors, in a study aimed at testing the Syracusan hypothesis, interpreted the succession of patinas and encrustations as compatible with a long stay of the statues on seabeds 70–100 metres deep, followed by a much shorter period on shallow sandy seabeds; among the environments compatible with the first phase, they also identified the seabed off Brucoli, 70–90 metres deep and characterized by muddy sediments and coralligenous formations.
Description