Leonardo Ciocca was a novice detectorist when he thought he’d made the discovery of the century.
He had been searching for treasures beneath the earth in a patch of Umbrian countryside when his metal detector began to emit a series of high-pitch beeps. The machine indicated the presence of a deeply buried “precious” metal.
“So I obviously became very excited,” said Ciocca. “I started digging and at a certain point glimpsed some silver, and thought it might be quite a large silver bar.”
Slowly, the object revealed itself to be a speculum – the kind used by vets to examine the intimate parts of animals. The tool is thought to have dated to the 1960s, when the area Ciocca had been exploring was farmland.
“Maybe a vet had visited a cow and left the tool behind,” he said. “I must say, it is probably the strangest thing I have ever found.”
Such disappointment may have put others off, but 16 years later, Ciocca is now one of Italy’s most revered detectorists, a community of an estimated 25,000-30,000 that has grown significantly in recent years.
To the uninitiated, the assumption is that detectorists spend most of their time scouring beaches for their finds. Indeed, while beaches are popular – especially post-summer when visitors have returned home, leaving behind coins, jewellery and sometimes even gold teeth – most detectorists in Italy practise their hobby inland.
“Those who go to the beaches do so to find today’s money and objects that are valuable, such as gold rings, which bathers often lose, so there is a lot more competition,” said Ciocca. “But inland we have much more space and can spread out more and find patches all to ourselves. In these areas you’re more likely to find something of historical value.”
On a recent morning, Ciocca took the Observer to Parco del Grottone, a huge pine forest in the province of Viterbo, about 70km from Rome.
After explaining how a metal detector works, Ciocca, equipped with two other essential tools – a spade and a device that pinpoints the location of a find – contemplated which direction of the forest to walk in. Finding something worthwhile is mostly luck, he said. But also intuition. So we headed left, hovering our detectors along a path that is popular with joggers, who often drop coins.
On the edge of the path, Ciocca’s sophisticated detector made quite a vibrant beep and indicated that the item could be jewellery. So he decided to stop and dig. The anticipation was palpable. However, the object turned out to be a piece of aluminium used to package medicine. A golden rule among detectorists is to clear any rubbish they find. Subsequent beeps led to rusty nails, bits of discarded drink cans and a 20 cent coin.
The jaunt wasn’t so fruitful, but over the years Ciocca and his fellow detectorists have unearthed many gems.
Finding coins in lira, the old Italian currency, is common, but so is digging up coins bearing the face of either the first or third kings of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele II and III, and dating from 1861, when the short-lived monarchy began.
“You find these coins everywhere, especially in the middle of wooded areas,” said Ciocca. “Maybe they were dropped by farmers, shepherds or people who had gone there to chop wood.”
Other finds have included religious votives dating to the 1700s, and ancient buttons worn by farmers in the hope that they would bring a good harvest.
For Ciocca, among the most interesting discoveries is the “trench art” produced by soldiers during the first and second world wars.
“Especially the second world war when soldiers spent months and months closed in trenches,” he said. “They had to distract themselves from the horror and so took objects – cutlery, mess tins or parts of ammunition – to make jewellery and even lighters. They were very elaborate – I’ve seen bracelets made with bits of grenades.”
Detectorists have also found rings and dog-tags engraved with the names of American soldiers, and have sometimes been able to trace their relatives to return the items.
Italy is open for detectorists to freely explore, apart from some areas of Veneto and Bolzano, where permits are required, and in the semi-autonomous Aosta Valley, where the practice is banned.
However, hunting in archaeological areas is strictly out of bounds. There are also rules about which objects detectorists can keep – relics, for example, must be handed to the relevant authority within 24 hours. Contemporary items, such as jewellery, must be handed in to lost property. If not claimed by an owner after a year, the item is given to the detectorist.
Such is the popularity of the hobby in Italy that Ciocca set up an “academy” in Cesenatico, a beach resort in Emilia Romagna, next to Detector Shop Italia, with which he works. The beach has since become a hub for detectors, with a treasure hunt each year: whoever finds the most metal tokens buried in the sand, wins a prize. There is a hotel in nearby Milano Marittima dedicated to detectorists.
Ciocca said he still feels like a “child at Christmas” whenever his detector makes a beep that could uncover something precious. However, many excursions only lead to finding rubbish.
Does he ever get bored? “You can never get bored of this hobby, because even if you don’t find anything, you have still had a good walk in the outdoors, in areas full of nature where the only sound is the beep and the birds, and are instantly relaxed.”
