Showing posts with label Sicily. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sicily. Show all posts

Magna Græcia

Magna Græcia
Still the grandest complex of Doric temples outside Athens, Paestum had been a 6th century B.C. Greek colony, famed in antiquity for roses and violets.


 American ambulances parking by the temples of Neptune and Ceres as U.S. infantrymen push past the centre of the American sector during the landings around Salerno Bay.
On September 9, 1943, Paestum was the location of the landing beaches of the U.S. 36th Infantry Division during the Allied invasion of Italy. German forces resisted the landings from the outset, causing heavy fighting within and around the town. Combat persisted around the town for nine days before the Germans withdrew to the north. The Allied forces set up their Red Cross first aid tents in and around the temples since the Temples were "off limits" to bombing by both sides.
The second Temple of Hera was built around 460–450 BC. It has been variously thought of as a temple dedicated to Poseidon. The Temple of Hera II has nothing in common with the first temple, reason being for its symmetrical style for its columns. Also every column does not have a normal 20 flutes on each column but it has 24 flutes. The Temple of Hera II also has a wider column and a smaller spacing for the placing of the columns. The temple was also found to be used to worship more than just Hera but also Zeus and another unknown god. There's a legend where beings would go to the temple in hope to make love with the goddess and the belief on insuring pregnancy; Hera is also the goddess of childbirth. There are visible on the east side the remains of two altars, one large and one smaller. The smaller one is a Roman addition, built when they cut through the larger one to build a road to the forum. It is also possible that the temple was originally dedicated to both Hera and Poseidon; some offertory statues found around the larger altar are thought to demonstrate this identification.
A company of men has set up its office between the Doric columns the temple of Poseidon, built about 700 BCE.
The first Temple of Hera, built around 600 BC by Greek colonists, is the oldest surviving temple in Paestum. Eighteenth-century archaeologists named it "The Basilica" because they mistakenly believed it to be a Roman building. A basilica in Roman times was a civil building, not a religious one. Inscriptions revealed that the goddess worshipped here was Hera. Later, an altar was unearthed in front of the temple, in the open-air site usual for a Greek altar; the faithful could attend rites and sacrifices without entering the cella.
On the highest point of the town, some way from the other temples, is the Temple of Athena. It was built around 500 BC, and was for some time incorrectly thought to have been dedicated to Ceres. The architecture is transitional, being partly in the Ionic style and partly early Doric.
On the sacred way between the Justice Gate and Golden Gate to the north which had been destroyed in 1828 the road was built through the excavations.
The so-called hypogean (underground) shrine found in 1954. Appearing as a small inaccessible underground room with a roof made of plain tiles and an altar on the steps at the front, inside was found eight bronze vases containing honey, a black-figure amphora depicting the apotheosis of Heracles, and five iron skewers on two stone blocks. The small monument located at the western end of the agora, was originally placed under a mound making it not visible. It was later bordered by a quadrangular enclosure in blocks and dated to 520-510 BCE to represent an heroon- a cenotaph in honour of the hero-founder of the city. It was assumed that it commemorated Is, the mythical founder of Sybaris, led to Paestum by sybaritic refugees. The assumption that it is an underground chapel for worship of the nymphs - a result of the discovery of a ceramic fragment with its graffiti - is now discredited.
The so-called Porta Sirena (Siren Gate) located at the east walls of Paestum. Its name is due to the bas-relief in the keystone which represents "Scylla" with its two fish tails.
 Beside Greek houses- that on the left with its large area of tessellated pavement which has been preserved and that on that on the right which had a swimming pool forming part of the peristyle; the temple of Athena can be seen in the background.

Paestum is also renowned for its painted tombs, mainly belonging to the period of the Lucanian rule, while only one of them dates to the Greek period. It was found, on 3 June 1968, in a small necropolis some 1.5 km south of the ancient walls. The burial monument was named Tomb of the Diver after the enigmatic scene, depicted on the covering slab directly behind me, of a lonely young man diving into a stream of water. It was dated to about 470 BCE, the Golden Age of the Greek town. The tomb is painted with the true fresco technique and its importance lies in being "the only example of Greek painting with figured scenes dating from the Orientalising, Archaic, or Classical periods to survive in its entirety. Among the thousands of Greek tombs known from roughly 700–400 BCE, this is the only one to have been decorated with frescoes of human subjects." The symposium on the north wall.  The remaining four walls of the tombs are occupied by symposium related scenes, an iconography far more familiar from the Greek pottery than the diving scene.  All the five frescoes are visible in the local National Museum, together with the cycle of Lucanian painted tombs.



 Metapontum
arriving at Palermo- view 1914 and a century later

 Segesta

On a hill just outside the site of the ancient city of Segesta lies this unusually well preserved Doric temple. It is thought to have been built in the 420s BCE by an Athenian architect and has six by fourteen columns on a base measuring 21 by 56 metres, on a platform three steps high. According to the tradition used in Virgil's Aeneid, Segesta was founded jointly by the territorial king Acestes (who was son of the local river Crinisus by a Dardanian woman named Segesta or Egesta) and by those of Aeneas's folk who wished to remain behind with Acestes to found the city of Acesta.
   
Several things suggest that the temple was never actually finished. The columns have not been fluted as they normally would have been in a Doric temple and there are still tabs present in the blocks of the base (used for lifting the blocks into place but then normally removed). It also lacks a cella and was never roofed over. The temple is also unusual for being a Hellenic temple in a city not mainly populated by Greeks. It can also be noted that this temple lacks any painted or sculptured ornamentation, altar, and deity dedication. This temple escaped destruction by the Carthaginians in the late 5th century.
The theatre
In front of the statue of Horace in his birthplace of Venosa. Venusia was supposedly one of many cities said to be founded by the Greek hero Diomedes after the Trojan War. He dedicated Venusia to the goddess Aphrodite, also known as Venus, to appease her after the Trojans were defeated.  It was taken by the Romans after the Third Samnite War of 291 BC, and became a colony at once. No fewer than 20,000 men were sent there, owing to its military importance.  Throughout the Hannibalic wars it remained faithful to Rome, and had a further contingent of colonists sent in 200 BCE to replace its losses in war. In 190 BCE the Appian way was extended to the town.  It took part in the Social War, and was recaptured by Quintus Metellus Pius; it then became a municipium, but in 43 BCE its territory was assigned to the veterans of the triumvirs, and it became a colony once more.  Horace was born here in 65 BCE.  It remained an important place under the Empire as a station on the Via Appia, through Theodor Mommsen's description of it as having branch roads to Equus Tuticus and Potentia.
In the site's ruins in front of the Church of SS. Trinità, consecrated in 1059 by Pope Nicholas II and passed into the hands of the Knights of Saint John in the time of Boniface VIII (1295–1303).

 In the central aisle is the tomb of Alberada, the first wife of Robert Guiscard and mother of Bohemund. An inscription on the wall commemorates the great Norman brothers William Iron Arm, Drogo, Humfrey and Robert Guiscard. The bones of these brothers rest together in a simple stone sarcophagus opposite the tomb of Alberada. The church also contains some 14th-century frescoes.
In the ancient amphitheatre adjacent to the church which furnished the materials for its walls.   





























 
 The National Archaeological Museum in Naples in 1895 and today
 
Inside then and now; the exhibits in markedly third-class surroundings today. This marble statue of Athena Promachos ("Athena who fights in the front line") was found at the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum.