Ipogeo Scocchera B

When workmen's spades broke into the tufa at Piano San Giovanni in 1895, Canosa gained one of its most storied tombs. Scocchera B, found by accident facing its twin Scocchera A ten metres across, is a chamber tomb with a temple-front entrance, faint painting of a journey to the Underworld, and a grave outfit remembered for a gold sceptre.

Why it matters

Scocchera B distils what makes the Canosa hypogea extraordinary: architecture, paint and wealth combined in one burial. The chamber, set on the axis of its dromos, was approached through a facade of semicolumns, capitals and a pediment — a naiskos, the little temple front that Hellenistic families used to turn tombs into shrines. On its walls the Fondazione records traces of a painted deductio ad inferos, the procession that escorts the dead to the world below, one of the rare figurative programs of Daunian painting. The objects recovered here rank among the richest funerary assemblages found in the whole city.

What to notice

The entrance composition includes semicolumns and capitals carrying a pediment, formalising the threshold in the manner of a Greek temple. Surviving patches of paint document the deductio scene — fragmentary now, but enough to show the taste of a family that wanted myth on its tomb walls. The finds inventories conjure the rest: vases with plastic decoration, statuettes of mourning orant figures, glass cups, earrings and the celebrated gold sceptre, emblems of status that accompanied the deceased. After both tombs were emptied, they were covered over and lost to memory for decades; the Fondazione Archeologica Canosina has recovered and interpreted unit B with funds from the 5x1000 scheme.

Context and history

The tomb's discovery year, 1895, belongs to the early age of Canosa's underground explorations, when private excavation moved faster than documentation — which is why the account of the grave goods survives mainly through later reconstruction. The complex dates to the third–second centuries BC, within the mature phase of the Daunian-Hellenistic chamber tombs, contemporaries of the Varrese and Lagrasta tombs and the painted Cerbero tomb. The pairing with Scocchera A sharpened the picture: its twin yielded red-figure vases, a bronze anatomical cuirass and a chased Celtic helmet, likely a war trophy, so the two chambers facing each other preserved two different strategies of commemoration. Scocchera B lies at Piano San Giovanni, near the early Christian baptistery, linking Canosa's urban history with its necropoleis. The quarter's name is not accidental: the San Giovanni area also preserves traces of the course of the via Traiana, the road whose traffic fed the wealth these tombs celebrate.