Doro Levi (1899–1991)

Doro Levi was an Italian Jewish archaeologist of Greek and Roman sites in the Mediterranean and a professor of Greco-Roman history. Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss invited Levi to lecture at Dumbarton Oaks on the Cretan site of Arkades in 1937. Because of the Fascist racial laws in Italy in the period of the Second World War and at the urging of Royall Tyler, Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss helped Levi to obtain a position in the United States. Between 1938 and 1945, he was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and a lecturer at the University of Princeton and Harvard University. During this period, he wrote and published Antioch Mosaic Pavements (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), a two-volume study of the mosaics of the classical site of Antioch. Doro Levi returned to Italy in 1946 and was the director of the Italian Archaeological School in Athens between 1947 and 1976. During this period, he directed the long-term excavation at Minoan Phaistos.