On the acropolis of Selinunte, a Greek colony on Sicily's southwestern coast, archaeologists spent eighteen field seasons between 2006 and 2024 tracing the walls of a temple whose foundations were laid around 580 B.C. Clemente Marconi directed every one of those seasons. He died in New York in July 2026, at 60, while holding the James R. McCredie Professorship in the History of Greek Art and Archaeology at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and a professorship in classical archaeology at the University of Milan.

Marconi trained in Rome and Pisa. He earned a bachelor's degree in classics, summa cum laude, from the University of Rome, La Sapienza, in 1990, then a doctorate, also summa cum laude, from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa in 1997, according to New York University. Before he crossed the Atlantic, he served as assistant curator at the Archaeological Museum in Agrigento from 1995 to 1997 and taught at La Sapienza through 1998, work that kept him close to the Sicilian sites that would define his career.

In 1999 he joined Columbia University's Department of Art History and Archaeology, rising to associate professor before New York University recruited him in 2006 to the McCredie professorship at the Institute of Fine Arts. That same year he began directing a joint Institute of Fine Arts and University of Milan excavation on Selinunte's acropolis, codirected by his wife, archaeologist Rosalia Pumo of the Institute of Fine Arts, with Andrew Farinholt Ward of Fairfield University serving as field director.

Over eighteen seasons, the Selinunte mission grew into a multidisciplinary operation, drawing more than a hundred student archaeologists and specialists in architecture, conservation, zooarchaeology, paleobotany and archaeometry from institutions including Columbia, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the German Archaeological Institute. Excavations in the site's Main Urban Sanctuary uncovered a theatral structure Marconi's team named the South Building, and campaigns between 2013 and 2015 found evidence of animal sacrifice in the foundations of Temple R, raised around 580 B.C. and dismantled during the First Punic War in the third century B.C., according to his Institute of Fine Arts faculty biography.

His academic reach extended beyond Selinunte. He held the Elizabeth A. Whitehead Professorship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 2010 and 2011, returned to Athens as a visiting professor at the Australian Archaeological Institute in 2019, and in 2017 took up a second full professorship, in classical archaeology at the University of Milan, while continuing to teach in New York. He edited The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Art and Architecture in 2015, more than two decades after publishing one of his first studies of Selinunte's Heraion metopes in 1994. In 2021 he was elected a corresponding member of Italy's Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and he also belonged to the Academia Europaea and held corresponding membership in the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut.

Word of Marconi's death reached Sicily through his wife, who told Felice Crescente, director of the Selinunte Archaeological Park, according to ANSA. Crescente said Selinunte had lost one of its most authoritative scholars, an archaeologist who gave decades of research, passion and scientific rigor to understanding and preserving the site, and that his work would continue in its scholarship, its discoveries and its memory.

What persists at Selinunte is a record built stratum by stratum: the sacrificial deposits inside Temple R, the outline of the South Building, and the more than one hundred students who learned excavation on the acropolis under Marconi and Pumo. His edited Oxford Handbook and his decades of studies on Archaic and Classical Greek temple decoration remain reference points for scholars who never worked beside him, and the excavation he founded in 2006 continues under the partnership he built between New York and Milan.