Antonio Piaggio's 1753 machine was the first durably workable method for unrolling Herculaneum papyri — 'more successful' than the destructive attempts before it, per CISPE

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Antonio Piaggio's 1753 machine was the first durably workable method for unrolling Herculaneum papyri — "more successful" than the destructive attempts before it, per CISPE

CISPE, the Italian international research center for Herculaneum papyri, credits the invention directly to a single named figure: "Antonio Piaggio, a Genovese priest, developed a new and more successful method. For this reason, at the request of Carlo di Borbone, the director of the Vatican Library sent Piaggio to Portici in June 1753. There Piaggio invented the famous machine for unrolling carbonized papyri which has opened almost all the texts we have today." Wikipedia corroborates what the machine replaced: "The unrolling was partially successful, but proved to be rather destructive for the fragile scrolls, yet vastly improving on the prevailing practice of eviscerating or scraping the scrolls." Neither source claims the machine was non-destructive or the absolute first attempt: CISPE places it after "various unprofitable and destructive attempts," and Wikipedia calls Piaggio's own unrolling "rather destructive." What the receipts support is narrower — the first durably workable method, arriving after cruder, destructive handling of the carbonized rolls.

This sits at the start of a roughly 270-year lineage of progressively less destructive methods for reading Herculaneum papyri, continuing through Knut Kleve's 1980s chemical (acetic-acid/gelatin) technique and into the X-ray and machine-learning methods that read PHerc. 1667 end-to-end in 2026, the latest stage of the program proved out on the 2015 En-Gedi Scroll. See entity-antonio-piaggio.