Historical lights that rise in Salerno…
In Paestum, discoveries in the temple
Vita gazette – New finds that shed light on the story have been discovered in the sanctuary located along the walls of the ancient city of Magna Graecia in the province of Salerno. In Paestum, the works to bring to light the cover discovered in 2019 along the old city’s walls reveal great surprises.
Paestum, an ancient city of Magna Graecia called by the Greeks Poseidonia in honour of the god of the sea, the work in progress to bring to light the sanctuary discovered in 2019 along the walls of the ancient city located in the province of Salerno is revealing great surprises.
Started in 2020 and immediately blocked by the pandemic, excavations have resumed for a few months: What we are facing today is the moment in which the sanctuary, for reasons still to be clarified, was abandoned, between the end of the II and the beginning of the 1st century BC, the analysis of the clay decorations has allowed us to date its foundation in the first quarter of the 5th century BC when some of the most important monumental buildings that have come down to us had already been built in the Greek colony: the temple of Hera, built between 560 and 520 BC, and that of Athena, which dates back to 500 BC.
The temple of Neptune was completed instead a little later, in 460 BC, after a long gestation. Of very small dimensions – measuring 15.60 meters by 7.50 – with four columns on the front and seven on the sides, the little temple is in Doric style like the others, but the purity of its forms distinguishes it.
The work in progress in the sanctuary discovered along the walls of the ancient city of Magna Graecia, located in the province of Salerno, holds excellent surprises. Among the finds are decorations in coloured terracotta, a gorgon, seven bullheads and hundreds of votive offerings, among which the images of an Eros riding a dolphin stand out.
One of the 250 architectural and decorative fragments belonging to the structure of the Greek temple dating back to the first decades of the 5th century BC was identified in 2019 in the western part of the Paestum site.
Almost like an open window on a 500-year-long fragment of the life of the city that the Greeks of Sibari founded in 600 BC. and which then came under the Lucanians to eventually become a colony of Rome.
The stone base with the access steps and the delimitation of the cell that housed the divinity, the coloured terracotta decorations of the roof with the lion-shaped drips, an extraordinary Gorgon, and a moving Aphrodite. But also seven astonishing bullheads, the altar with the grooved stone to collect the liquids of the sacrifices and hundreds of votive offerings, among which stand out the images of Eros riding a dolphin that the imagination could refer to the mythical Poseidon, the god who gave the city its name.
However, the expanse of objects found in the space that separates the front of the building from the altar, erected as a rule outside, is also extraordinary: terracotta figurines with the faces of the offerers or those of the deities, as many as 15 with little Eros riding the dolphin, miniature temples and altars.
Miniature masterpieces of craftsmanship are added to the seven bullheads around the altar, perhaps “props” available to those who administered the cult. And which seems to have been placed on the ground with devotion, “as in a closing rite,” reasons D’Angelo, implemented when the sanctuary continued to be frequented even in the Lucan era and from 273 BC. With the arrival of the Romans, it fell into disuse.
It is the most miniature Doric peripteral temple we know before the Hellenistic age, the first building in Paestum that fully expresses the Doric canon. Almost a small model of the great temple of Neptune, which at the time must have been under construction, is a missing link between the 6th and 5th centuries BC. Therefore, very important.
Paestum, until 1926 Pesto, is an ancient city of Magna Graecia, called by the Greeks Poseidonia in honour of Poseidon, but very devoted to Athena and Era. After its conquest by the Lucanians, it was called Paistom, to assume, under the Romans, the name of Paestum. The extension of its inhabited area is still clearly recognisable today, enclosed by its Greek walls, as modified in the Lucanian and then Roman times.
It is located in Campania, in the province of Salerno, as a fraction of the municipality of Capaccio Paestum, about 30 km south of Salerno (97 km south of Naples); it is located in the Piana del Sele, near the coast, in the Gulf of Salerno, north of the Cilento, Vallo di Diano and Alburni National Park; the town, near which there are Capaccio Scalo and Lido di Paestum, is served by the railway station of the same name.
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