When Pellegrino Claudio Sestieri opened the first real excavation campaign at Grumentum in 1951, he began with the theatre: he brought half of it to light, then the money ran out and the work stopped there. The building dates from the age of Augustus and belongs to the season in which the town, destroyed and sacked by the Italic allies during the Social War, was put back on its feet from the second half of the first century BC and filled with new public monuments. The other half of the theatre had a long wait: the restoration was carried out by Dinu Adamesteanu, the first superintendent of antiquities for Basilicata, between 1964 and 1968, and it was he who published the results of the digs.
What to see
The theatre occupies the northern part of the Roman town, not far from the amphitheatre. It does not stand alone: a small monumental cluster presses around it and is visited together with it, with the remains of two temples of imperial date and those of a wealthy house that archaeologists call the House of the Mosaics, after the mosaic floors preserved in some of its rooms.
Walking south you reach the forum, closed by porticoes, with the remains of two temples on the north and south sides, tentatively identified as the capitolium and a temple of the imperial cult, and on the west side those of a basilica. The town had been founded by the Romans in the third century BC as a fortified outpost on the via Herculea: an elongated plan on three parallel streets crossed at right angles, walls with six gates over some 3 km, 25 hectares of which only a tenth has been uncovered. In 1961 the Ministry of Public Education declared precisely the area of the theatre, the baths and the amphitheatre to be of major archaeological interest.
Visiting
The park lies on the valley floor, in the Spineta district, at the foot of the hill Grumento Nova sits on and a short way from the lake of Pietra del Pertusillo. Visitor services have been fitted into the Republican baths, along the eastern decumanus, so it is worth looking around while you buy your ticket. The Museo nazionale dell'Alta Val d'Agri, with its panels reconstructing how the monuments looked, adjoins the site: seeing it first makes the theatre far easier to read.
Our editors' tip
From the theatre take the few steps to the circular frigidarium of the Republican baths and look inside the basin: pressing floors for crushing grapes and fermenting the must were built in there in the modern period. Between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the archaeological area had gone back to being vineyard country with farmhouses, and this is the spot where the two histories physically overlap.