Christianity + Malaria = Desertion

Dad made it a point of taking me to what he thought and to what I have to agree is one of the best Greek/Roman ruins in Italy, Paestum.

What was originally a Greek city named Poseidonia founded around 6^th century BC, was later taken over by the Romans in 273 BC and Latinized to Paestum.  The Romans apparently changed the layout of the city and built a couple of temples and things to make it their own.  The city was deserted as Christianity and malaria spread up the coast.  (I am not saying the spread of Christianity is as deadly as malaria, but in Polytheistic city it’s one in the same)

The one thing that was disappointed was the English map of the ruins.  We received an Italian one and kept it but the ticket lady said there was one in English at the tourist center so we thought it might put things into perspective by getting that one too.  Over half of the things aren’t labeled on the English one, which we didn’t discover until we looked at the Italian one and the historical description of the city was terrible.  It was 2 pages of run on information that wasn’t really translated into complete sentences.  Oh well we figured it out and had fun using what knowledge we have gained along the way to figure out what was what.

Like the other ruins, this is going to be best described in photos:

On our quest for the English map, we stumbled across this church, Basilica Paleocristiana V sec.  It was pretty plain on the exterior and as you can see somewhat stark on the interior, yet it was striking.  There was a terracotta floor with designs going towards the altar and the raw materials gave the church a real quality.  There was a plaque outside that stated the church had started off as a basic place of worship like it is in now, in an effort to attract people and raise money someone blinged it out, but then it was stripped back to its original state.

Dad and I in front of the Tempio di Athena.  This is the first temple when you walk into the ruins and it’s quite impressive.  There are three temples like this built and still intact.  I still can’t wrap my head around how many slaves and how long it would take to build a temple of this magnitude.

One of the things we discovered on our own, without the help of our crappy English map, was the baths.  Every town had them so it was just a process of elimination and looking for clues to discover where they were.  Tada!  We could tell because of the bigger mosaic work on what is left of the walls and because of drainage holes along the bottom of the walls.  There was also space between what looked like one building and the next which would serve as some sort of sewage drain.  The Romans used some of the same structures the Greeks already had and just built around or on them.  The clay bricks are Roman and the bigger boulders are Greek.

When the Romans invaded this small temple called the Heroon was already erected.  Out of respect to the God that was honored there, they didn’t break it down, they just buried it and built a wall around it.  Problem solved.

Welcome to the ancient city of Paestum. 

Just like at Pompeii you can see where the chariots used to use the road.  There were some pretty extreme grooves in the stones here.  They didn’t have the sidewalks or pedestrian stones though so whatever was drained into the street was walked in I am sure.

This was a marble “pool” that would’ve been in the middle of a house.  We figured that this was a pretty big house based on the number of rooms, size of the pool, and the face that it was made of marble, not bricks.  The ceiling would be open above the pool area to collect rain water to drink and store in a cistern that wasn’t still standing in this location.  The well type holes were still there though.

This is Dad the Gladiator.  Half of the theater was visible to the public, while the other half was buried under a road that was built to let people access the ruins and to serve as a great place for vendors to set up tourist trap shops. 

We got to the ruins right when they opened, which also happened to be right when the sun was coming up facing them.  This was the view of Tempio de Nettuno, or Temple of Poseidon, the crown jewel of Paestum.

This is a close up of the columns.  I am still amazed at how they were constructed and the slave labor and raw materials that would’ve been used.

Dad, Mow, and I posing in front of the Temple de Nettuno.  This gives a great perspective of its sheer size.  There were 36 fluted columns rivaling some of the finest temples in Greece.

One final shot of the Temple de Nettuno.  It was absolutely awe inspiring and beautiful.  In this shot you can see the levels of the interior.  There were three “rooms” of columns inside that housed various statues and offerings to the god.

Located next to the Temple de Nettuno was what the maps named the Basilica, but the plaque corrects this misunderstanding and states it as the Temple to Hear, Zeus’s wife.  It isn’t as big as the Temple de Nettuno, but it holds it own.

The Temple to Hear had one interior “room” made of columns.  All of the temples, while magnificent in size, were fairly basic in design, what made them spectacular during the 6^th century was all of the statues and exterior decorations that are now located in the Museo Nazionale located just outside the ruin walls.