The Gods Await You at Paestum

Near Naples, it’s a case study in archaeology in Italy.

I’ d never been to Paestum, the archaeological park about 60 miles south of Naples on the Tyrrhenian Sea and site of what might be the three best-preserved Doric temples from ancient Greece. It’s an arresting experience. To say it the best I can, they put me in an awed state of mind because they seem to have been built by the gods themselves, hewing and placing mammoth stones and columns with an exactitude of a man — or woman — building his or her own home. The temples are balanced, majestic, and elegant, a combination that’s divine anyway we see it.

And the supreme flower of the austere Doric style those gods preferred. Hera, Poseidon, and Athena might not be there anymore, but let’s not quibble about what the Greeks understood more than 2,500 years ago and what we do and don’t grasp now.

First, what was Paestum or, as it was called by the Greeks, Poseidonia? Greeks settled it around 600 b.c. possibly coming from opulent Sybaris in Calabria, from which “sybarite” comes. How very not Doric. Who knows who was there before. A small city developed named for Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. It was then closer to the water, with later silting putting the shore a mile or so west. The ascendant Romans came to town in 273 b.c. and changed its name to Paestum.

I came to the park on foot from the tiny train station that’s half a mile from the park, which is about 60 acres and surrounded by three miles of ancient walls. Ancient Paestum covered hundreds of acres more. The walk from the train station to the park is flat as a pizza and farmed. No one knows what’s under the earth. For now, time is hiding it. By a.d. 800, ancient Paestum was empty. Nobody thought about it until European artists, most notably Piranesi, and aesthetes found it starting in the 1750s.

Two of the temples loom steps from the tiny ticket office. I look at the sweep of the park. The temples’ massive steps and stark, thick columns don’t soar from the landscape. They’re too jumbo and assertively fixed to the ground, and to Earth, and they look as if they’ve been there forever. What’s called the Temple of Poseidon is the famous one, but it’s the newest, said to have been built around 460 b.c., so it’s a bit older than the Parthenon. It still has its pediment, too. Next to it is what’s called the Basilica, the temple dedicated to Hera, built between 560 and 520 b.c. They’re near the southern walls. On the other side of the park, near the northern wall, is the Temple of Athena, from around 500 b.c.

Between the two temples on the south and the temple on the north are the squat ruins of ancient Paestum. The amphitheater, old forum, Greek-era assembly hall for citizens, and baths are there, a short column now and again remains, but mostly it’s foundations and walls. There’s a Greek-era assembly hall. Poseidonia was a democracy, not exactly like a New England town meeting but a very early citizen-driven form of government. To the west of the temples are the remains of the stalls of the high-end residential neighborhood. Location, location, location.

There were very few visitors there, which was fine, but people don’t know what they’re missing in a part of Italy that’s dense with sights, sounds, and sea air. As much as I could, I felt I was communing with another world. Paestum isn’t a dead place, and the temples are austere but not unforgiving or bleak. Ovid wrote from his long exile in Romania on the Black Sea that the thing he missed the most of home was the scent of Paestum’s roses. Roses in peach, cream, pink, and dozens of shades of red covered the ancient city. The flower business was big, with Paestum supplying the rose petals that emperors on down sprinkled on the beds of wives, mistresses, concubines, and, in the case of Caligula, his horse. Caligula and his horse aside, the park does well in helping us imagine a human past.

Interpretation is simple, very good, and conveyed through about a dozen easy-to-read panels mounted in strategic spots, in Italian and in English. I read everything but wanted atmosphere. Paestum’s buildings are made from local honey-colored travertine. It’s porous, with natural veins and holes that, I imagine, have developed over time, so the stone has the look of experience. This makes the Temple of Neptune more powerful. The three steps to enter are each around 18 inches high, steep to my lanky limbs but people were so much shorter then. How did they get in?

The short and long answer is that they didn’t. The temple’s not a place for worship. The altars were outside, in front and in back. The temple was a house for the god, represented by his or her statue placed in the cella, or the nave. It was built to the scale of the gods, not to ours. No one except a big-shot priest entered. Behind the columns were walls.

Well, that was 2,500 years ago; the walls, statue, and roof are gone, and Methodists like me and, in fact, all who can climb the steps, can enter the peristasis, once the hall between the columns and the walls. The three temples are Doric, which means fat, bulging columns, bare capitals and architraves, triglyphs flanked by metopes, and a roofline. Every view from within commands and compels from sheer rigor. No wonder so many mathematicians came from this part of the Very Old World.

The three architectural orders — Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian — are well defined, but in the days of Poseidonia, the Doric order was still in flux. The capitals of the Basilica are flat. Over time, they became taller and narrower. In the Basilica, the cella has two naves delineated by a central alley of columns. The Temple of Neptune’s cella has three naves created by one row of columns on each side. These extra two columns supported a heavier roof. Metopes? They were likely painted, as were the capitals and triglyphs. The park thinks the scheme was red and blue. Grooves on the pediment of the Temple of Neptune might mean a painted canvas, which might have been as big as a sail, or massive marionettes might have been raised by ropes. The Temple of Athena is thought to be the first Greek temple with outer Doric columns and inner Ionic columns.

The museum, first opened in 1952, is in the park. It’s been expanded since then and recently reinterpreted. It’s very, very well done, treating art history as well as everyday life. Man does not live by archaeology alone. Outside on the museum grounds are 20 or so metopes from the no-longer-standing Temple of Peace, from about the second century b.c. and Roman. They depict the sack of Delphi by the Gauls and are very worn, so we can detect fleeing bodies but not much else.

Inside, there’s a startling display of the remains of lion-shaped, painted terra-cotta waterspouts from the Temple of Athena and bits and pieces of terra-cotta, sculpture, and architectural travertine telling us it might have been very colorful indeed — and a tip of the hat to ye olde Sybaris. Over the past 50 years or so, hundreds of ceramic, metal, and stone offerings left by worshippers have been found. They’re both somber and precious. We’ve found ceramic and glass shards in the yard of our house in Vermont, built in 1915, so I wasn’t surprised to see a case of pottery shards.

There are examples of South Italian vases, very much with a look of their own. Greek cities imported vases from Corinth done in up-to-date Athenian styles, both black-figure and red-figure, but between, say, 450 and 300 b.c., a distinct style developed with added colors, especially white and yellow, and a grandiose, theatrical, even honky-tonk look.

The museum’s treasures are the metopes from a now-gone, small temple in a sanctuary dedicated to Hera built around 600 b.c. in Sele, a few miles north of what’s now Paestum. A group is on display on the exterior of the central room in the museum, built to resemble the temple. They’re in Archaic style, still stiff and stylized but with a stab at movement and natural form and a taste for the grisly. I like them a lot. There’s nothing wrong with being to the point.

One of multiple reasons to get to Paestum is the frescoed Tomb of the Diver, at the museum and discovered in 1968 in a necropolis near the site. It’s from between 500 and 475 b.c. Two of the painted panels depict a dinner party, with men drinking wine and reclining. Two small panels are ritual figure scenes. The largest panel depicts a single male figure jumping from a diving board into a stylized sea, or from life into the world of the dead. It’s minimal and perfect.

In 2019, using drones, magnetology, and ground-penetrating radar, the park’s archaeologists and researchers discovered the remnants of a small temple, possibly older than the Basilica, near the old walls. The old capitals excavated starting in 2022 suggest that the temple was built before the city walls. The dig, a giant move for the archaeological park, is in process. The Italian government owns, by my count, 96 archaeological parks ranging from Pompeii and the Roman Forum to small, out-of-the-way places such as Paestum. With thousands of years of history, Italy has who-knows-what buried in the ground or underwater. Digs are expensive, and inertia is an Italian disease, so Paestum is fortunate to have gotten the support to do this.

About 15 years ago, the Italian government launched a fateful, risky experiment. Its museum system, culture officials knew, was sclerotic through a century of sinecure hiring, deferred maintenance, indifferent collection care, and listless outreach. Security and finances were understood to be hair-raising. The government established a pilot program hiring professional, experienced foreigners as directors with a charge to modernize and a sacred promise — sworn on the eternal fate of Mama’s soul — of no political interference.

The batch of new directors were English, French, German, Canadian, and American. Most had worked in American museums. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, a 34-year-old German archaeologist, was hired to run Paestum. His dissertation focused on a Greek sanctuary near Rome where, Plutarch says, a tutor engaged by wolves taught Romulus and Remus how to handle weapons. Off to Rome they went, and the rest is history. He’d also worked on research projects at the Pompeii archaeological site and in Matera.

Zuchtriegel had never run a museum before, but he’s a high-stepper, metaphorically, and Paestum was the perfect place for experimentation. The site’s small and quiet, off the touristical path, and a place where a few changes — many what I’d call low-lying fruit — could make a difference. He improved the park’s system of paths — never treacherous but no longer difficult — and organized temporary exhibitions. During his reign, the museum was renovated. He also opened the temple interiors to tourists.

Other big priorities were the use of new technology that discovered the temple foundation near the old walls and a new approach to engagement.

His vision, which might have been foreign to Italian archaeologists, links archaeology and anthropology to the public’s understanding of history. This is the philosophy I see at work at the museum. Zuchtriegel served as Paestum’s director for five years. In 2021, he was hired as director of the massive, million-moving-parts Pompeii site. I visited Pompeii last week and will write about the site in November. Paestum’s new director, Tiziana D’Angelo, is Italian and went to Harvard, where she might have learned not to return phone calls and emails.