NNP

Howland Wood served as Curator of the American Numismatic Society from 1913 to 1938 and in that capacity sent and received thousands of letters, which have now been digitized under sponsorship of Newman Portal. This series consists of nearly 3,000 individual correspondent files, with scanning by Internet Archive associate Lara Jacobs launched in late 2023 and recently completed.

One of the final files is that of Mario Zucchi (1872-1949) of the Royal Library in Turin, Italy. In this correspondence, Wood requests plasters of ancient coins of Metapontum and later acknowledges receipt of the same. The Zucchi plasters are presumably no longer in the ANS collection or are uncataloged. The ANS online catalog, MANTIS, reports 520 results on the search term “Metapontum,” but a successive search on the words “plaster” or “cast” reveals no hits. 

Most examples of the Metapontum coinage depict barley or grain. The ear of barley was a symbol of this Greek city-state in Magna Graecia (southern Italy) that represented the city's agricultural wealth and reminded trading partners of its abundance. The file concludes with a request to host ANS President Edward T. Newell during his anticipated trip to Turin in spring 1922.

Link to Howland Wood curator correspondence: https://archive.org/details/americannumismaticsociety?tab=collection&query=%22howland+wood+correspondence%22&sort=title
Link to Mario Zucchi correspondence: https://archive.org/details/zucchimariocav1900amer/page/7/mode/1up