Every block in the outer face of the walls at Serra di Vaglio carries an incised Greek letter: they organised the building site, telling each crew which stone went where. The circuit, 2.5 km long, went up in the 4th century BC in the Greek double-curtain technique — roughly squared sandstone outside, stones left with an unfinished face inside — and above the gates, flanked by towers, an inscription names the magistrate who ran the works, Nummelos.
What to see
The settlement is far older than its walls. The first huts, scattered in clusters with burial grounds in between, go back to the 8th century BC and are attributed to the Peuketiantes, the people recorded by Hecataeus of Miletus, who buried their dead in a foetal position. At the end of the 7th century BC a princely residence went up on the eastern slope, decorated with painted architectural terracottas in the Greek manner, probably from the workshops of Metapontum. The tombs of the nearby Braida di Vaglio necropolis, excavated in 1994 and 1995, produced bronze banqueting vessels, Etruscan and Greek pottery, weapons and jewellery: the richest set belonged to a girl who died as a child, buried in all likelihood with the ornaments meant for her future wedding, amber included.
Inside the park a 4th-century BC building has been rebuilt in full using period techniques: the house of the pithoi, divided into three rooms. The name comes from the four big storage jars found lined up in a row and wedged with stones in what was clearly a storeroom.
Visiting
The site sits at 1100 metres, on a height watching the Basento valley, the route that linked the Greek colony of Metapontum to the interior and to the Tyrrhenian towns of Campania. Since December 2014 it has been in state hands, today under the Direzione regionale Musei. Look at the wall circuit and the gates first: they are the part that reads most clearly, and they were what still stood when, early in the 3rd century BC, fire brought the town to an end.
Our editors' tip
Allow for a stop in Potenza: the grave goods from the princely tombs of Braida — nine burials under a stone mound — are not here but in the Museo archeologico nazionale della Basilicata. Without that amber, that gold and those bronzes, the plateau risks staying a fine line of walls and nothing more.