Parco Archeologico di Monte Sannace

Five kilometres from Gioia del Colle, a walled Peucetian city spreads across the hill of Monte Sannace. Circuit walls from the fourth century BC enclose an acropolis with a public stoa, an elite house and painted chamber tombs kept under a protective roof.

Why it matters

The Ministry of Culture describes Monte Sannace as one of the most important indigenous settlements of pre-Roman Peucezia, inhabited from the Iron Age through the early imperial Roman period, with its peak between the sixth and third centuries BC and especially in the Hellenistic age. Unlike Greek colony sites on the coasts, this was a native city of the Murgia interior, and its monuments show how deeply Greek forms were absorbed by a local community. Its archaeological remains sit within the open landscape of the Murgia.

What to notice

Circuit walls built in the second half of the fourth century BC divide the city into two ancient parts: the acropolis on the high ground and the lower settlement descending towards the plain to the west. The acropolis includes a public building known as the stoa and a Hellenistic house. Painted chamber tombs survive beneath a protective canopy; tomb number 8 is dated to the early third century BC. A rural trullo on the acropolis records the later pastoral use of the hill. The site has also been linked to Thuriae, the place named by Livy in his account of a failed Spartan expedition, though this identification remains a hypothesis.

Context and history

Antique diggers reached the tombs long before archaeologists did: nineteenth-century looting stripped much of the necropolis before any record was kept. The first official excavation came in 1929 under Michele Gervasio. Systematic campaigns by the Superintendency ran from 1957 to 1961 under Bianca Maria Scarfì, and the work resumed from 1976 in the lower settlement and from 1978 on the acropolis under Ettore Maria De Juliis; a University of Bari mission has been active since 1999. Finds from those campaigns form the core of the National Archaeological Museum in the castle of Gioia del Colle, linking the excavation site with its collection.