I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. How come I never have heard of this place until the first set of itinerary notes that Leslie drew to my attention when she started putting this trip together?
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
We arrived in Paestum (pronounced PICE-tum) late in the day after we departed Ravello, the end of a long drive. And true to form, Back-Roads Tours had arranged our accommodation in yet another gorgeous hotel / restaurant called Il Granaio dei Casabella. Its name suggests almost all of its history as a granary and silo until it was renovated in the mid-1990s into the beautiful 14-room hotel and high-quality restaurant it is today.
The owners have done a wonderful job keeping the rustic feel both inside and out.
The only flaw, at least from Leslie’s point of view, was the excessively firm mattress… perhaps not quite the unyielding stone beds we saw in Pompeii’s brothel, she said, but “damned firm” nonetheless.
After settling in and freshening up, we assembled for a last group dinner together where, aided by Back-Roads’ surprising discovery that there was enough money left in the budget to pay for several bottles of wine (that, at least, was Sharon’s story and she was sticking to it!), the evening became one of convivial hilarity.
And much to my surprise, the group presented me with a just-slightly-belated birthday card – actually a postcard showing two of Paestum’s three temple ruins – that everyone had signed. When I asked how the news had leaked out, Sharon said I’d let it slip when I had previously explained what the occasion was that took us to la Caravello in Amalfi for our special dinner for two. (I actually don’t remember doing that… which might have been the residual effects at next morning’s breakfast of the evening wine and afternoon Limoncello we’d imbibed that day. That’s MY story and I’m sticking to it!)
Sometime over the course of the evening, Sharon also told us that the temples were beautifully lit at night and the three of them were no more than a 15-minute walk away from the hotel’s front door.
So after dinner, Leslie and I did exactly that and it turned out to be well worth the stroll into the warm Italian evening.
The three together very much left us with a great sense of anticipation about the next day’s visit to the overall site. But not without a small sense of wistfulness, because it would also be our last day with a group whose company we had very much come to enjoy in only the short week we had spent together.
Again we were ready to entrust ourselves to the very well-informed tutelage of Eliana. Once inside the gate, however, we had a (quiet) collective group laugh as she led us over to an open patch to deliver her introduction to the site as a whole, completely oblivious to the fact that just as she was about to start, no fewer than three large groundskeepers’ lawnmowers simultaneously fired up not ten yards away from where we were gathering. No doubt mindful of the previous day’s episode among the Villa Rufalo’s bells, Sharon pointedly escorted us all over to the far side of the nearest temple to put it squarely between us and the mowers. Today, at least, we’d get to hear Eliana.
Briefly, Paestum actually changed hands over the course of its history, hardly surprising since it was a Greek colony located in Italy. A combination of brutal military conquest followed by political unrest and upheaval saw its Greek roots supplanted by Roman domination, specifically by a powerful subset of Rome – the Lucans. In a most Big Brother-y conquest, the Lucans systematically sought to erase all things Greek about the city and remake them into all things Roman.
Oddly enough, the Poseidonians moved past any lingering resentment and Paestum became one of Rome’s most loyal allies through the Punic Wars with Carthage during the 3rdC B.C., even to the extent of offering Rome the gold from its temples to support the war effort. The Senate, however, declined but never forgot the gesture.
What this means when it comes to naming the features of Paestum, is that they can take on an aura of near schizophrenia, especially its temples, whose names depend on whether your source is Greek or Roman. The Roman god of the sea, Neptune, for example, was known to the Greeks as Poseidon; the Romans’ Hera was the Greeks’ Athena and the Greeks’ Zeus was Jupiter to the Romans. Even the temple to Athena was at one time thought to have been renamed to honour Ceres, the Roman goddess of the harvest, fertility and grains (the source of our word, cereal).
My point is that it’s possible, if you decide you want to delve into the City’s history beyond what I do here, you might start to think there were six or even seven major temples; but as you’ll see, there were, in fact, just three.
One of the reasons that Paestum is so well-preserved has echoes of the Pompeii story, but with a “catastrophe” much less spectacular than a volcanic eruption as the cause. As Paestum grew, the surrounding forests were pillaged for building materials, a deforestation that caused the rivers running through the nearby plain gradually to fill up with silt and eventually stop flowing altogether. The resulting marshland became a vast mosquito hatchery and malaria grew rampant in the city. This had two effects: the population eventually moved away and the City’s reputation as a centre for deadly illness made it no bargain for ransacking and pillaging by potential conquerors either.
I also discovered one much more recent and no less fascinating sidebar to the Paestum story when I happened to browse a massive coffee table book in the foyer of Il Granaio – the story of WWII’s Operation Avalanche. The code name applied to the landing of the Allied armies – officially at Salerno, just a few miles away, but in reality at Paestum and the ruined city was among the first pieces of real estate through which the invasion force swept as they moved inland. The book featured a panoramic two-page black-and-white American aerial reconnaissance photo that took in the beach, the ruins and even what was then the farm and granary that in the mid-1990s was to become our hotel.
Fortunately for the sake of those with a passion for antiquity in their histories, Paestum did not become the major Salerno battlefield and the ruined city suffered no significant WWII battle damage. (Although also in the book there were several sobering photos of dead German soldiers on the road that ran right past what, 60 years later, would be our hotel.)
The temples are no less imposing in the light of day. One of the fascinating things we learned from Eliana relates to this particular temple, known as the Temple of Hera (or possibly Juno) to the Romans and the Temple of Athena to the Greeks. Almost without exception, classical temples have an even number of columns across the front but a quick count reveals that this one has nine.
This has led scholars more recently to suspect that this particular temple was, in fact, intended to be shared equally by the seniormost male and female gods on Olympus and the odd number of columns creates an absolutely perfect centre line so that neither Hera nor Zeus (nor Juno nor Jupiter) would have even a centimetre of interior temple space more than his or her counterpart on the other side of the line. Looking at the temple absolutely dead on from the front is a view resonant of several scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s movie, “The Shining”, which also featured countless left / right symmetrical framings used by the Director to provide rock-solid visual anchors for his film of Jack Torrance’s growing and deeply unsettling insanity.
When I asked Leslie why it was she knew about Paestum with her liberal arts education while I’d never heard of it with mine, the answer lay in the simple fact that her degree included the study of the architectural side of art history, which formed a large part of her university curriculum. And even a cursory read of most modest tourist guidebooks to the site reveals content replete with references to Doric, Ionian and Corinthian (columns), colonnades, pediments, cornices and entabulature. But since this is a trip diary and not a fourth-year study of classical architecture, you’ll just have to trust me when I say that Paestum – especially in its temples – has superbly preserved examples of all of the foregoing, and dozens of other classical building features.
Like Pompeii, Paestum still hides a great many of its secrets in large zones that are yet to be excavated.
The buried Greek and Roman history that eventually will be unearthed is something that no doubt will keep archaeologists and antiquities scholars happy for hundreds of years to come.
Our final Back-Roads group event was a last lunch together in The Basilica Café, directly across the road from its namesake temple (The Temple of Neptune / Poseidon is also known as the Basilica) with yet another round of complimentary wine and beer -- augmented by an old family dessert recipe made by the owner's mother -- to ease us off to our various points of departure in a cheery mood. (Luigi thoughtfully said he would make all the requisite stops on the way back into Naples.)
Ours was the rail station. Other group members were deposited at the airport and even our pre-Amalfi hotel – the Turchini – for one or two more nights before saying goodbye to Southern Italy.
Leslie’s and my destination was, once more, Rome. Leslie was booked to attend a conference (which she later confessed was one of the most dismally administered academic gatherings she had ever attended). For my part, I would be opting for some solo wanderings before we reunited for one of the most profound experiences of our whole trip – an almost exclusive (eight people; I call that “almost” exclusive) one-hour visit to the Sistine Chapel, and the most authentic Italian lunch in Rome! (Oh, the lunch wasn’t actually “profound”, but it was great.)
All to come in what will probably be two or three more entries, along with a final wrap-up report on some of the amazing tastes of Italy (some of which will be new; others will be reminders of things you’ve already met in earlier diary notes).
So hang in there! The end is in sight.
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