Greek coins of Italy and Sicily

This volume is continuation of the series of catalogues describing coin collection of the Pushkin Museum in Sylloge format, which begun with publication of the ancient coins of the Black Sea Region (2011, 2014). The Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts possesses the third largest numismatic collection in Russia, after the State Hermitage and Historical Museum (Moscow). It is the only museum institution in Russia today, which provides access to its coin collection for the international scholarly community by publishing it in well-established format giving image and detailed description of every coin. Coins of the Greek cities of Italy and Sicily form noticeable part of the collection of the ancient coins in the Pushkin Museum and comprise 766 specimens. Along with ordinary issues there are among them fine and quite rare pieces, which undoubtedly will attract interested attention of both, scholars and coin collectors. Sergei A. Kovalenko is Deputy Keeper of the Coins&Medals Department of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts. He graduated from the Archaeology Department of the Moscow State University in 1984 and is in charge of Greek, Roman, Parthian and Byzantine coins stored in the Museum. Dr Kovalenko is ordinary fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society (Great Britain). In 2000-2002 he was granted research fellowship of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany). Dr Kovalenko has been specializing in the numismatics and archaeology of the Greek cities of the Northern Black Sea littoral and publishing extensively on the subject. These publications among other comprise books 'Historical and Archaeological Essays on the Greek and Late- Scythian Cultures in the North-Western Crimea' (Moscow, 2005, in Russian, with Elena Popova) and 'Die sptklassische Mnzprgung von Chersonesos Taurica' (Berlin, 2008). He was the first Russian numismatist, who took part in the International 'Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum' project and prepared two volumes dealing with the ancient coins from the Northern Black Sea region (Leuven 2011, 2014). Recently his catalogue of the Byzantine coins in the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts has come out (Moscow, 2015).