Ascea

Ascea came into being around the year one thousand, and filled up when people left Castellammare della Bruca, which is what was left of Velia, because the plain of the Alento had turned to marsh and there was malaria. Velia to the Greeks was Elea, and earlier still, in the pronunciation of its Phocaean founders, it sounded like Vele: the city was founded by refugees from Ionia fleeing the Persians.

Elea was divided in two, with two harbours and two peoples: the Phocaeans to the south, the Sybarites to the north, in a harbour they called the houses of the night because the sun never reached it. When the Syracusans threatened to attack, it fell to Parmenides, the philosopher, to negotiate the reunification: to seal it he drove along the road joining the two harbours, the road of the God, on a chariot drawn by mares. Then he became the city's lawgiver and governed it until his death, and his poem begins with that very journey, at the end of which a goddess dictates the laws to him. Today Ascea has a museum of paradox, dedicated to the other Eleatic, Zeno.