Museo Archeologico Nazionale dell'Alta Val D'Agri

Fossil bones from when a great lake filled the Agri valley 120,000 years ago, weapons from Lucan warrior tombs, the marble portrait of empress Livia Drusilla: the state museum at Grumento Nova unfolds the whole biography of this corner of Basilicata, from the Pleistocene to the early Middle Ages.

Why it matters

This is the museum that makes sense of everything around it. Built over the southern necropolis of the Roman city of Grumentum and inaugurated in 1995, it is run by the Direzione Regionale Musei of Basilicata under the Ministry of Culture, and its remit goes far beyond the Roman ruins next door: it presents the history of the upper Val d'Agri from the Pleistocene to the early Middle Ages. Its garden even keeps a stretch of the Roman aqueduct that once served the city, so the building itself sits inside the ancient landscape it interprets.

What to notice

The chronological exhibition begins with remains of the straight-tusked elephant (elephas antiquus) and of horses, animals that frequented a large lake basin here roughly 120,000 years ago, long before any town existed.

Bronze Age material follows, from hilltop settlements of the Apennine culture, in particular Civita di Paterno and Murgia Sant'Angelo di Moliterno. The classical and Hellenistic section centres on funerary assemblages from the countryside of Montemurro, tied to the Lucan occupation of the fourth century BC: red-figure pottery, weapons and armour, banquet equipment, cosmetic vessels and personal ornaments that document a local aristocratic elite. Votive terracottas — mostly statuettes — come from a rural sanctuary of the third century BC at the edge of Grumentum, dedicated to a female deity, perhaps the goddess Mefitis.

The Roman rooms gather the most significant finds from the city itself. Among the Roman finds are a refined marble head of Livia Drusilla, recovered in the forum, and an ivory pyxis carved with a Dionysiac scene. From the baths come marble statues — headless and damaged, like so much surviving Roman sculpture — of two nymphs, of Aphrodite with her dolphin, and of Dionysus. An epigraphic section of celebratory and funerary inscriptions and a rich coin collection close the picture of urban life.

Context and history

The museum opened in 1995 as the state's interpretation centre for the excavations of Grumentum, the Roman colony considered the most important ancient site of Roman Basilicata, and it stands on the remains of the city's southern necropolis. The museum's collections include material from excavations in Grumentum and the surrounding upper Val d'Agri, including the imperial baths, forum and Roman villa at Barricelle di Marsicovetere.