Founded around 600 BC by settlers from Sybaris under the name of Poseidonia, taken by the Lucanians as Paistom and made a Latin colony in 273 BC under the name of Paestum, this city had three names and a single ending: water. Not a flood, and not an eruption either, but a slow silting into marsh that ate it over centuries, until it was abandoned altogether.
What to see
Beyond the temples there is the city, and it is the city that tells the struggle. The geographer Strabo writes that Paestum was made unhealthy by a river close by, the Salso, today the Capodifiume, which still runs against the southern walls and at Porta Giustizia is crossed by a small bridge of the 4th century BC. As its mouth silted up the water no longer drained away, and the people of Paestum raised the level of their streets, lifted the thresholds of their houses, rebuilt the drains at ever higher levels. Those raised thresholds can still be seen, and they are the record of a war that was lost.
Visiting
Below the walking level, between the Basilica and the temple of Neptune, runs a gallery some fifty metres long, known before the nineteenth century and then forgotten, explored again in 2020. It was reached down a stairwell and held four wells that gathered the rainwater channelled from the roofs of the two largest buildings in the city; it also served for ritual ablutions. It was the answer to the problem that had always dogged Paestum, since the springs near the sea gave brackish water and the Capodifiume was barely drinkable: the same water that, so heavy with lime, according to Strabo turned anything to stone in a short time.
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That lime ended up covering everything, and for centuries it convinced scholars that nothing of the ancient city survived apart from the temples: serious digging began only when the crust was recognised as a recent formation. Meanwhile the town had withdrawn to the highest ground, around the temple of Athena, which became a church; then, between the 8th and the 9th century, the inhabitants left for the hills, to the springs of the Salso, Caput Aquae, from which Capaccio comes, escaping malaria and Saracen raids. They took the pomegranate with them, one of the symbols of the Hera of Poseidonia, and it passed to the Madonna, who is still called Madonna del Granato. On the plain the buffaloes stayed, the only animals that could stand the malaria.
