Parco archeologico di Grumentum

Spread across the valley floor below Grumento Nova lie the excavated streets of Grumentum, the Roman city that Basilicata calls its little Pompei. A mosaic-rich town house, two bath complexes, a forum, a theatre and an early stone amphitheatre stand in open countryside, framed by the Lucanian Apennines.

Why it matters

Basilicata's Greek antiquity lives on the Ionian coast at Metaponto; its Roman antiquity survives most completely here, in the upper valley of the Agri river. The regional tourism board and the Ministry of Culture's own museum both present Grumentum as the most important Roman site in Basilicata, and the comparison with Pompei refers to the legibility of the town: a walled city of about three kilometres of walls, laid out in regular building blocks around a main road axis, with its public monuments and private houses still traceable on the ground. The excavated streets, squares, baths, places of worship and dwellings remain legible in their original relationship.

What to notice

The main street axis, called the decumanus or more precisely the plateia, organizes the monuments.

The Domus with Mosaics occupies an entire city block of roughly 30 by 60 metres. Shopfronts open onto the street; behind them run the entrance corridor, an atrium with its rainwater basin, a dining room floored in polychrome mosaics of plants and flowers, a colonnaded peristyle around a garden, and a large reception hall in black-and-white geometric mosaic. An apsidal shrine for the household gods stands beside the atrium, and lead water pipes still carry stamped inscriptions naming the maker and, probably, one of the owners. The house's main phase belongs to the second century AD, and it remained in use until at least the mid-fourth.

The Terme Maggiori, the great baths, are the place to read Roman engineering: sixteen rooms, floors raised on suspended supports over a hypocaust fired by three furnaces, wall flues, and a cistern fed from the aqueduct. The cold room keeps a mosaic of a sea scene with the monster Scylla, Giants and marine creatures; four statues were recovered from the apsidal pool.

The forum was paved and enclosed by colonnades between the Augustan and Julio-Claudian age. Its oldest monument is the Capitolium, dedicated to the Capitoline triad; opposite stands a temple probably used for the imperial cult. The fine marble head of Livia Drusilla, Augustus's widow, surfaced here — the original is displayed in the nearby state museum.

On the eastern terrace by the walls, the amphitheatre dates to about the middle of the first century BC, which makes it one of the earliest known examples built in masonry. Its arena measures 55 by 35 metres, with no underground service rooms, and external staircases with double ramps recall the amphitheatre of Pompeii.

The paleochristian basilica of Santa Maria Assunta records the city's afterlife: probably the cathedral of a bishopric established at the end of the fourth century and cited in a letter of Pope Gregory the Great. A small crypt with burials and thirteenth- and fourteenth-century frescoes adds a later layer.

Context and history

Grumentum began in the early third century BC as a Lucan settlement probably allied to Rome. Livy describes fighting at its gates when Hannibal campaigned through Lucania during the Second Punic War; the town was later destroyed in the Social War, an episode that Seneca, Appian and Macrobius all recall. Colonial status arrived in the first century BC, and with it the transformation the official museum text sums up as a "little Rome": amphitheatre, theatre, a forum quarter with temples and a basilica, two bath complexes, and town houses with mosaic floors. The second and third centuries AD were its most prosperous phase, drawing on territory known for wine and pork, and the consular via Herculia linked it to the Appian way to the north and the Popilia to the south. After the martyrdom of San Laverio nearby, the city became a Christian centre and then a bishop's seat; decline set in, and by about the ninth century the site was abandoned, its people settled on the hill above at Saponaria, today's Grumento Nova.