Parco Archeologico di Sibari

Stratified beneath the Sibari plain lie three cities on one site: Achaean-founded Sybaris, the panhellenic colony of Thurii and Roman Copiae. Shifting rivers buried them in silt; excavation campaigns beginning in 1932 reached them metres below the surrounding plain.

Why it matters

The protected area, officially named Area archeologica di Sybaris-Thurii-Copiae, contains three cities on one site. Sybaris, described by the park's institute as one of the most ancient Greek foundations in the West, gave the world an adjective for luxury before its downfall; two later cities rose on exactly the same ground, and ten centuries of continuous occupation lie stacked in the silt. The cities were buried beneath river-borne deposits. Their recovery began in 1932 and continued through major campaigns from 1969 onwards. The Parco del Cavallo sector exposes monuments of Roman Copiae.

What to notice

In the Parco del Cavallo sector the most legible remains belong to Roman Copiae: the Emiciclo-teatro, the baths, the rooms of houses, the Porta Nord and a final stretch of the city wall, with the street grid of Thurii still discernible in the layout around them. The levels stack Greek, Hellenistic and Roman remains, making the vertical sequence the site’s central feature. Understand the ground itself: the ancient city lay between the rivers the Greeks called Krathis and Sybaris, today's Crati and Coscile, and as those courses shifted they buried the streets under sand and silt, raising the plain so far that excavators had to dig to an average depth of about four metres with continuous drainage. Named dig areas recorded by the Treccani encyclopedia — Stombi, Parco del Cavallo, Prolungamento and Incrocio — together cover over two and a half hectares of the buried city.

Context and history

Achaean settlers founded Sybaris in the last quarter of the eighth century BC on dunes between the two rivers, and the city's prosperity shows in the trade goods recorded from the excavations, which include Corinthian, Attic, Laconian and Etruscan wares alongside its own pottery. The first city ended in the last decade of the sixth century BC, in agreement with the literary tradition; after roughly two generations of sparse occupation the panhellenic colony of Thurii rebuilt on nearly the same area with a Hippodamian plan — three plateiai and five stenopoi, its blocks a measured 295 metres across — and the Roman phase identified with the colony of Copia continued from the early second century BC into late antiquity, adding the theatre-exedra, baths, necropolis and the concrete wall whose remains structure the park today. Modern recovery began in 1932, when Umberto Zanotti Bianco, searching for the lost cities of Magna Graecia along the Crati, brought up the first columns of a monumental Copiae building from marshy ground; war and the land-reclamation works of the plain interrupted the dig, which resumed from the same point in 1969 with major state funding and strong local participation.