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Amalfi · 2025

2025 Amalfi 3 - Paestum

A weathered stone temple with tall, fluted columns stands on a grassy site behind a low wooden fence.
A sunny street lined with colorful market stalls selling souvenirs, with pedestrians strolling along the sidewalk and a green railing on the left. A stone temple with columns stands on a hill under a clear blue sky, with an orange fence in the foreground. Weathered stone columns of an ancient Greek temple stand against a clear blue sky. A weathered two-story building with a tiled roof stands behind a fenced area of ancient stone ruins under a clear blue sky. Weathered stone columns and a triangular pediment of an ancient temple stand against a clear blue sky. A large pine tree frames a view of ancient stone ruins and a colonnaded temple beneath a blue sky and distant hills. A weathered ancient stone temple with Doric columns stands on a grassy hill under a clear blue sky, with trees and mountains in the background. Sunlit archaeological site featuring weathered stone foundations and a reconstructed section of a sloped terracotta tiled roof. Stone ruins sit in the foreground with a cafe and colorful buildings nestled against a mountain backdrop. Two tall, reddish brick columns stand among low stone ruins under a clear blue sky. A paved stone walkway flanked by low, weathered stone walls runs through an ancient archaeological site, shaded by a large tree on the left. A low-angle view of a rectangular stone foundation with pillars, set in a grassy field under a bright blue sky. A stone temple with columns stands behind brick ruins and trees under a blue sky. A paved stone road runs between weathered stone walls, with trees in the background under a clear blue sky. A rectangular sunken marble pool sits in the foreground of an expansive archaeological site with stone walls and columns under a blue sky. Close-up of a weathered mosaic floor featuring white tesserae forming geometric patterns against a reddish-brown background. A weathered, reddish-brown stone floor featuring a white geometric labyrinth mosaic pattern, bordered by a rough stone wall and a rope barrier. A wide, uneven stone-paved road runs through grassy ruins under a bright blue sky. A weathered stone arch bridge spans a grassy path flanked by ancient ruins and large paving stones. Ruins of ancient stone temples with columns stand among trees under a clear blue sky. A row of weathered stone columns supporting a ruined temple pediment stands against a clear blue sky, with a large tree on the left. A weathered ancient stone temple with tall, fluted columns stands against a clear blue sky. Weathered, fluted stone columns supporting heavy horizontal beams stand against a clear blue sky. Weathered, fluted stone columns support heavy horizontal beams under a clear blue sky. Close-up view of weathered, golden stone columns supporting a heavy architrave against a clear blue sky. A row of weathered stone columns supporting a heavy architrave against a bright blue sky. A row of massive, weathered stone columns supporting a heavy entablature stands against a clear blue sky. A row of massive, weathered stone columns supporting a heavy entablature stands against a clear blue sky. Low-angle view of massive, weathered stone columns supporting a heavy architrave against a clear blue sky. Weathered stone columns of an ancient Greek temple stand against a clear blue sky. A colonnade of weathered stone columns frames a paved walkway leading to a distant doorway and a tree under a clear blue sky. Weathered fluted columns and a stone architrave of an ancient ruin stand against a clear blue sky. Weathered stone columns of an ancient ruin stand against a clear blue sky, with small plants growing in the crevices. Weathered stone columns and ruins stand under a clear blue sky, with a green tree visible in the background. Weathered stone columns and architrave of an ancient Doric temple stand against a clear blue sky. A bronze horse statue stands before the ruins of an ancient stone temple with columns. Close-up of weathered stone columns and lintels against a bright blue sky. A narrow walkway between towering stone walls leads toward a colonnade of ancient columns under a clear blue sky. A close-up view of a weathered, pitted stone column in the foreground, with other columns and a bright blue sky visible through an archway in the background. A dense canopy of bright green pine needles and dark branches silhouetted against a clear blue sky. A large stone pine tree with a broad, flat canopy of bright green needles stands against a clear blue sky. Stone ruins of an ancient site sit beneath a clear blue sky, with two prominent, wind-swept trees standing among the scattered stones. Weathered stone columns and blocky ruins sit in the foreground, with a red-roofed building and a mountain in the background. A weathered stone archway frames a view of green trees under a clear blue sky. A grassy field with stone ruins sits before a row of buildings with terracotta roofs under a clear blue sky. A grassy oval arena surrounded by concentric stone seating tiers and partial brick walls. A fragment of an ancient fresco depicting a nude male figure standing beside a table holding a large dark vessel. A fragment of an ancient fresco depicting three groups of figures reclining on couches at a banquet. A rectangular ancient fresco depicting a diving figure above a stone structure, framed by stylized trees and spiral motifs, mounted on a stand. A rectangular ancient fresco depicts five figures reclining on couches, engaged in a banquet scene with a reddish-brown lower band. A fragment of an ancient fresco depicting three painted figures against a white background above a red band.
Journal Notes

General

Paestum is the Latin name of the ancient Greek city of Poseidonia, whose ruins lie on the coastal plain of the Sele river in the province of Salerno, Campania, about a kilometre from the present Tyrrhenian shoreline and some 90 km south of Naples. The city was founded on a low plateau of travertine (freshwater limestones deposited during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene in the southern sector of the Sele plain), which raised the settlement above the surrounding alluvial lowlands. Three Doric temples dating from about 550 to 450 BC, preserved to their full height, dominate the site and rank among the best-preserved examples of Greek architecture anywhere in the Mediterranean. The archaeological area, together with the modern national museum, forms the principal remains of the ancient city; the modern village of Paestum belongs to the municipality of Capaccio Paestum.

Since 1998 the site has been protected as part of the UNESCO World Heritage property “Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park with the Archaeological Sites of Paestum and Velia, and the Certosa di Padula”, inscribed under criteria (iii) and (iv) in recognition of the exceptional testimony of the Greek and Roman city and of the cultural landscape of the Cilento. The archaeological park attracts visitors throughout the year, and the site remains an active field of excavation and conservation research, administered by the Italian state archaeological authority.

The climate of the Sele plain is Mediterranean (Csa after Köppen), with hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters, moderated by the proximity of the sea. The plain itself is one of the most fertile agricultural districts of Campania, cultivated with vines, olives, fruit and, historically, the roses for which the territory was famous in antiquity. The combination of the three temples, the circuit of walls and the museum makes Paestum one of the most complete archaeological landscapes of Magna Graecia.

History

According to the geographer Strabo, the city was founded as Poseidonia, named for the sea god Poseidon, by Greek colonists from Sybaris, the Achaean city of the instep of Italy; some ancient sources instead connect the founders with the Troezenians, and the date of foundation is given by archaeological evidence as about 600 BC. The colonists first fortified a position near the sea (possibly the promontory of modern Agropoli) and then founded the city further inland on the higher, drier ground of the travertine plateau. The new city flourished as a Greek polis of Magna Graecia: two great sanctuaries of Hera were established, one within the city walls and one at the mouth of the Sele, and the temple of Athena was built on the highest point of the town in about 500 BC. The prosperity of the city rested on the fertile plain, on trade and on the production of painted pottery: the distinctive red-figure vases known as Paestan ware belong to a later phase of the city’s history.

During the late fifth century BC the city passed under the control of the Lucanians, the Oscan-speaking people of the interior, who retained the urban fabric and continued the cults of the Greek sanctuaries; the painted tombs of the Lucanian period are among the richest archaeological documents of the site. The city and its territory were drawn into the conflicts between Rome and the peoples of southern Italy, and in 273 BC, in the aftermath of the Pyrrhic War, Poseidonia was refounded as the Latin colony of Paestum. During the war against Hannibal the colony remained loyal to Rome and was rewarded with privileges including the right to mint its own coinage; under the empire it prospered as a Roman municipium, acquiring a forum, a Capitolium and an amphitheatre, while the Greek heritage of the city remained visible in its sanctuaries and in the dialect of its inhabitants.

The fertility and beauty of the territory were proverbial in antiquity: Virgil, in the Georgics, celebrates the roses of Paestum that flowered twice a year, and the city became a byword for the luxuriance of the Campanian coast. A Christian bishopric is documented from about AD 400, and the city survived the end of the western empire, although its territory was increasingly affected by the silting of its harbour and the progressive waterlogging of the coastal plain.

Between the fourth and seventh centuries AD the city entered a long decline. The deterioration of the natural drainage converted the low-lying parts of the plain into swamps, creating the malarial conditions that made the site increasingly uninhabitable, and raids by Saracen pirates in the early Middle Ages completed the abandonment: the bishopric was suppressed in 1100, and the remaining population moved to the defensible hilltop of Agropoli, a few kilometres to the south. The ruins of Paestum were quarried for building stone (columns and blocks were carried to Salerno, where they were reused in the cathedral of Robert Guiscard) and the site was gradually overgrown and forgotten.

The ruins were correctly identified as Greek temples as early as 1524, but only in the eighteenth century, in the wake of the discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, did Paestum attract wide attention, when the construction of the coastal road from Naples opened the site to travellers. Giovanni Battista Piranesi published his atmospheric etchings of the temples in 1778, and the austere Doric forms of Paestum exercised a lasting influence on the Greek Revival architecture of Europe. Systematic excavation and restoration followed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the modern museum was built beside the site, and the discovery of the Tomb of the Diver in 1968 revealed the only surviving example of Greek wall painting of the classical period found in situ.

Geology

The ruins of Paestum stand on the southern coastal plain of the Sele river, one of the largest alluvial plains of the Tyrrhenian coast of Campania. The plain is a tectonically controlled coastal basin, filled during the Quaternary with the sediments delivered by the Sele and its tributaries from the limestone massifs of the Campanian Apennines, and bounded inland by the foothills of the Cilento. The coastline has shifted repeatedly in response to sediment supply, sea-level change and tectonic movement, and the present shoreline lies well seaward of the ancient one.

The foundation of the city on a low travertine plateau reflects the geomorphology of the plain: the travertines are freshwater limestones precipitated from carbonate-rich spring and river waters during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene, forming a slightly elevated, well-drained surface above the swampy alluvial lowlands. Sedimentological analysis of these deposits shows that the plateau offered the only naturally dry and firm ground in the southern sector of the plain, an observation that explains both the location of the Greek colony and the tradition, recorded by Strabo, that the settlers moved their city inland from the coast to higher ground. The temples themselves were built of the same local travertine, a porous and easily worked stone that has weathered over the millennia to its present rough, coarsened surface.

The relationship between the city and the sea was central to its history. In Greek and early Roman times Paestum possessed a harbour on the lower Sele, sheltered by lagoons and connected to the sea; the sanctuary of Hera at Foce del Sele marked the river mouth. Progressive sediment accumulation and the progradation of the coastline gradually cut the city off from the sea, and the silting of the harbour, combined with the disruption of the plain’s drainage, converted the former lagoon and marshlands into stagnant, malarial wetlands. Geoarchaeological research has shown that these environmental changes (partly natural, partly the unintended consequence of land use) were decisive factors in the decline and eventual abandonment of the city in the early Middle Ages.

The soils of the plain derive from the mixing of alluvial sediments and weathered travertine with volcanic material transported from the Campanian volcanic province, and are among the most fertile of southern Italy. The same fertility that sustained the Greek and Roman city also supported the intensive agriculture of the modern plain, and the drainage works of the twentieth century, which reclaimed the malarial marshes, transformed the region into the cultivated landscape visible today. The water table of the plain remains high, and the conservation of the archaeological site requires continuous management of drainage and of the moisture balance beneath the ancient structures.

For the visitor, the geology of Paestum is most directly visible in the material of the temples themselves: the warm, porous travertine surfaces, the weathering of the columns and the low, terrace-like rise of the temple plateau all record the sedimentary history of the Sele plain. The site thus joins an archaeological narrative of more than two and a half millennia to a geological one that reaches back to the travertine deposition of the Late Pleistocene.

Things to See

The three Doric temples are the heart of the site. The so-called Basilica, in fact the first temple of Hera, was built about 550 BC and is the oldest and southernmost of the three; its nine columns across the front, its pronounced entasis and the traces of painted stucco on the capitals mark it as an early, experimental phase of Doric architecture. The second temple of Hera, built about 460-450 BC just to the north and long misnamed the temple of Poseidon, is the largest and best-preserved of the group: six columns on the short sides and fourteen on the long sides, with twenty-four flutes per column, it represents the mature classical Doric order. On the highest point of the ancient town stands the temple of Athena, built about 500 BC in a transitional style that combines early Doric with Ionic elements; the medieval tombs cut into its floor show that the building was later used as a Christian church.

Beyond the temples, the site preserves the circuit of walls (among the best-preserved of any Greek city in Italy) with its towers and gates, and the grid of paved streets of the ancient city, including the via Sacra that runs between the two Hera temples. The Roman phase of the city is represented by the forum, the remains of the Capitolium and the amphitheatre, only partially excavated, together with the houses and public buildings of the Roman colony.

The National Archaeological Museum of Paestum, built on the edge of the site, houses the finds from the sanctuary of Hera at Foce del Sele, including the famous metopes of the sixth century BC with their reliefs of the labours of Heracles, together with painted terracotta architectural decoration from the temples, Greek and Lucanian pottery, and the contents of the Heroon, the monumental tomb discovered within the city. The supreme treasure of the museum is the Tomb of the Diver, discovered by Mario Napoli in 1968: a painted tomb of about 480-470 BC whose lid bears the unique image of a youth diving into the sea, surrounded by symposium scenes: the only surviving example of classical Greek wall painting found in situ.

The sanctuary of Hera at Foce del Sele, a few kilometres from the city at the mouth of the river, can be visited as an extension of the archaeological area. The surrounding landscape (the plain, the line of the Sele and the mountains of the Cilento closing the horizon) completes the experience of a site where architecture, history and geology meet, and where the Greek temples still stand in the fields as they have for two and a half thousand years.

References

  1. Amato, V., Anzalone, E., Aucelli, P. P. C., D’Argenio, B., Ferreri, V. & Rosskopf, C. M. (2012). Sedimentology and depositional history of the travertines outcropping in the Poseidonia-Paestum archaeological area. Rendiconti Lincei 23. doi.org/10.1007/s12210-011-0155-z
  2. Napoli, M. (1970). La tomba del tuffatore: la scoperta della grande pittura greca. Bari: De Donato.
  3. Pedley, J. G. (1990). Paestum: Greeks and Romans in Southern Italy. London: Thames & Hudson.
  4. Virgil. Georgics, Book IV (the roses of Paestum).
  5. UNESCO World Heritage Centre (1998). Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park with the Archaeological Sites of Paestum and Velia, and the Certosa di Padula. World Heritage List, ref. 842. whc.unesco.org/en/list/842
  6. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Paestum. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paestum
  7. Wikipedia contributors (2026). First Temple of Hera (Paestum). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Temple_of_Hera_(Paestum)
  8. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Second Temple of Hera (Paestum). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Temple_of_Hera_(Paestum)
  9. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Temple of Athena (Paestum). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Athena_(Paestum)
  10. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Tomb of the Diver. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_the_Diver
  11. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Foce del Sele. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foce_del_Sele
  12. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Sele (river). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sele_(river)
  13. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilento_and_Vallo_di_Diano_National_Park
  14. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Lucanians. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucanians
  15. Wikipedia contributors (2026). Agropoli. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agropoli