powered by FreeFind	Velia 153 pictures     View from the Acropolis Velia lies about 40 km. south of Paestum. The history of this Greek colony is well known. Herodotus (5th century B.C.) and Strabo (Imperial Age), who refers to an older account by Antiochus of Syracuse, tell us that the inhabitants of Phocaea, a city in Asia Minor, hard pressed by the Persians, moved to Corsica around 545 B.C., where other Phocaeans had founded the city of Alalia about twenty years earlier. In the following five years the newcomers performed acts of piracy, arousing the ire of the Etruscans and the Carthaginians, allied to defend their interests on the Tyrrhenian. The Phocaeans were badly defeated in a naval encounter, and the survivors, with 20 ships, succeeded in reaching Reggio, where a native of Poseidonia indicated the site where a city could be founded. The new colony, named after a spring nearby, was called Hyele and then Elea, which turned into Velia in Roman times. The city is famous for its philosophers Parmenides and Zeno, who provided it with a solid constitution and good laws, thus enabling Velia to defeat the Poseidonians and the Lucanians. Even when Lucania later took over the entire region, it never succeeded in conquering Velia, always a faithful ally of Rome. The pleasant climate made it a favorite vacation site, where Cicero also sojourned. When the two harbors silted up (the area of the southern harbor was apparently already being used as a cemetery in the Imperial Age) the city declined. In the Middle Ages the inhabited center was limited to the hill, where the imposing Angevin tower was to rise in the 13th century. Elea or Velia stood on a promontory which originally faced the sea directly with the acropolis on high, while the two residential quarters, connected by a road, spread out on the slopes. Further south lies a large rectangular building, perhaps meant for the votive offerings of the sanctuary. A small theater was also built in the 3rd century B.C. and traces of the tiers still remain. East of the acropolis, an open space marks a zone where numerous shrines, alters and sacred areas dedicated to various divinities were situated, as is clear from the inscriptions found here and preserved in the little church nearby, which also has a small antiquarium open to the public. The walls of the city skirt the area; note the earliest phase, in small blocks, and the later one in large squared blocks. One of the square fortification towers stands on the way to the far end of the hill. The open space reached by passing over the arch of Posta Rosa contains the foundations of a shrine of Hellenistic date. A bit further on is another tower, known as Castelluccio, to which the fortification that enclosed the southern quarter was connected, Of the city's two quarters, only the southern one is open to the public, with the entrance at Porta Marina. On the right are funeral enclosures of Roman times. It is to be recalled that when the city was founded there was a harbor in this area and when it silted up at the end of the 4th century B.C., the result of a flood and the gradual withdrawal of the coastline, the entire zone was enclosed by a stretch of wall and urbanized. Further on the road skirts, on the right, there are two blocks with late 4th century B.C. dwellings before passing through a gate in the city walls. The large circular well then encountered was presumably, to judge from the material found and letters engraved on a rock closeby, part of a sanctuary to Eros. Further on, in a southeast direction, a large building, which occupies the space of an entire pre-existing block, is interpreted as the site of the imperial cult. Datable to the 1st century A.D., it consists of two triple porticoes of which one rests on a vaulted ambulatory of cryptoporticus. Nearby a bath building of the 3rd century B.C. has recently been excavated and restored. One of the rooms contains mosaics in tesserae, one of the oldest known to depict figures. Two uprights support a round arch, at present filled in. Dating to the second half of the 4th century B.C., it seems to be the oldest extant example of an arch built in ashlars in Magna Graecia. Acropolis On the left one can observe the remains of houses, mostly with a single room, built in polygonal blocks of sand-stone. These are the oldest dwellings in the city. Cut around 480 B.C., by the building of a great terrace wall in squared blocks, after which the upper part of the residential area was set aside as a sacred space. Only part of the foundations of the large temple which rose here are still visible, for the tower was built on the site of the cella. The Bath Built in the 2nd century A.D. with a mosaic pavement of marine subjects in the frigidarium. Southern Quarter Insula II Theater The Road to Porta Rosa At the end of the paved road is Porta Rosa, preceded by an older gate, a residue of the first fortification phase (around 500 B.C.). Porta Rosa is really none other than the monumental layout of the bottleneck through which passed the road that led to the northern quarter of the city, almost completely unexplored. Back to Italy Index