The oldest of the three temples has nine columns across the front instead of the usual six or eight, and a row of seven more runs down the middle of the cella, splitting it lengthwise: two doors, two aisles, perhaps two deities. Eighteenth-century antiquarians took it for a Roman civic building and called it the Basilica; inscriptions and terracotta statuettes found by the altar later showed it was a temple of Hera, built around 560 BCE by colonists from Sybaris who had founded Poseidonia here around 600 BCE. The Lucanians took the city at the end of the fifth century BCE, Rome made it a Latin colony in 273 BCE and gave it the name Paestum.
What to see
The three temples follow one another along the sacred way. Next to the Basilica stands the so-called Temple of Neptune, in fact a second sanctuary of Hera raised around 460 BCE: it is the best preserved, the only one that still carries almost all its entablature, and its columns are cut with twenty-four flutes instead of the standard twenty. At the northern end, on the highest point of the town, the Temple of Athena of about 500 BCE mixes the Doric order with Ionic details; three medieval Christian tombs open in its floor, because for some centuries it served as a church.
Around them lies the city itself: the Roman forum over the Greek agora, the round ekklesiasterion with tiered seats where the assembly met, the amphitheatre sliced in half by a road laid in 1930 that buried its eastern side, and the walls, almost complete, a circuit of 4.75 kilometres with four gates and twenty-four towers. Of the more than 120 hectares of ancient Poseidonia only about a fifth has been dug: the rest lies under farmland. In the museum is the Tomb of the Diver, five painted travertine slabs found by Mario Napoli on 3 June 1968 two kilometres beyond the walls: a banquet on the sides, a naked young man diving on the lid. It dates to 480-470 BCE and is the only intact Greek figured tomb painting of the classical age that has come down to us.
Visiting
The archaeological park and the national archaeological museum share a single ticket and face each other across the modern road, Via Magna Grecia, which cuts the ancient city in two. Paestum station, on the Naples-Salerno-Reggio Calabria line, is just outside the eastern walls, ten minutes on foot from Porta Sirena. Allow at least two hours for the excavations and another for the museum, which besides the Diver keeps the finds from the sanctuary of Hera at the mouth of the Sele. The site has been on the UNESCO list since 1998; in summer there is very little shade, so it is better to come at opening time or late in the afternoon.
Our editors' tip
In the museum we look at the four side slabs of the Tomb of the Diver before the lid: the banquet, the players, the boy drawing wine from the krater. Seen afterwards, the dive stops being a decorative motif and becomes what it probably was, the passage from life to death. And if time is short, we keep the last hour of daylight for the Temple of Neptune: the stone turns from grey to ochre and, looked at from the south, the columns line up one behind another.
