The Mediterranean Exchange of Archaeological Tourism, thanks to the precious collaboration of the Archaeological Park of Paestum and Velia and the Regional Directorate of Campania Museums, reserves visitors free admission to the sites and museums of Paestum, Velia, Eboli, Padula and Pontecagnano from Thursday, October 27th to Tuesday, November 1st, 2022.

The online registration and the printing of the personal badge are required. After the check at the registration desks at the Tabacchificio Cafasso and the Archaeological Museum it will be possible to collect the tickets for the Archaeological Park of Paestum, the National Archaeological Museum, the Archaeological Park of Velia.

For the Charterhouse of Padula, the Museum of Pontecagnano and the Museum of Eboli it is instead necessary to only show the personal badge, printed after the completed online registration, at the entrance of the site.

The following sites give free entry.

ant_paestum_tomba-del-tuffatoreNational Archaeological Museum of Paestum

The Museum collects unparalleled reports coming from the city and the territory of Poseidonia-Paestum: prehistoric funerary equipment, recovered architectonic and sculpture rests in the diggings. Of great interest is the futile statue seated of Zeus from the sixth century BC, large feminine bust, the lacking the head, from the end of the sixth century BC, the amphoras to hydria in bronze from the sixth century BC. The painted slabs coming from some 120 tombs up to now recovered, between one of the most famous is the painted tomb of the Diver from 480 BC. Sculptures, marmoreal registrations, cult objects, fragments and amphoras are the testimony of the Roman Age in Paestum.

1106_capaccio_1182817459Archaeological Park Paestum

Poseidonia was a Greek colony founded at the end of the seventh century BC by the Sybarites. Conquered at the end of the fifth century BC by the Lucanians, in the third century BC it became a Latin colony with the name of Paestum. Protected by five kilometers of pentagonal walls, the imposing Doric temples rise, dating back to the fourth and fifth centuries BC: the Basilica of Hera, the Temple of Neptune or Poseidon and the Temple of Cerere. The Basilica is the most ancient of the Paestum temples: it rises solemnly, with the gilded columns of the arch, orienting to east. The most classic and perfect example of a Doric temple of the Greek world is surely Neptunes temple. To the northern extremity of the sacred zone the temple Cerere rises, dedicated to Athena. The diggings regard an immense area of the city with other huge buildings like the thermes, the porch of the hole, the amphitheatre.

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Archaeological Park Velia

Velia, ancient Elea, was founded around 540 BC by the Focei colonies which came from Asia to battle Ciro’s army. Here Parmenide and Zenone were born and with the eleatica school, reference in the philosophical culture of the antiquity. In the modern remains the city system is obvious through which Door is approached through the imposing “rose” only example of Greek architecture with time all sixth. Valuable is the wall of the sacred fencing with the charming stoà or porch, paved in bricks from the Hellenistic Ages.

EboliNational Archaeological Museum of Eboli and the Media Valle del Sele

The Museum is housed in the Convent of St. Francis, founded in the thirteenth century and extensively remodeled in the sixteenth. Before the Second World War was used as the town hall, the district court and the local high school. The bombing of the war caused its partial destruction and abandonment. A recent restoration has returned to public use and the entire west wing of the complex is made available by the Municipal Administration of the Archaeological Superintendence of Salerno and Avellino, who oversaw the preparation of the Archaeological Museum.
Currently, the Museum collects artifacts, mostly tombs, from the old town of Eboli, which because of its location in the coastal plain at the mouth of major routes such as the natural river valley and the path of Tusciano Ofanto-Sele, represents the age a boundary between ancient territories participating in different cultures.
The exhibition is organized chronologically tended to present the main stages of life than thousand of the settlement: prehistory, the Iron Age, the oriental period, the sixth and fifth centuries, and, for now, ends with the rich documentation of the fourth century BC. By its nature it will be surfed for a museum in the near future to accommodate even the testimony of the territories bordering on the middle course of the gravitating Sele.
But it should be noted that this particular museum, created to tell the story of a former district is not culturally homogenous, will feed and grow with the results of field research, which is why the exhibition, the upper floors is still under construction, will become dialectically linked to the archaeological investigation and the subsequent reconstruction of the ancient landscape. In the lobby there is the base of a statue with an inscription (183 AD) known as Tombstone Eburina, which had been reused in the bell tower of the church of Santa Maria in Intra. This epigraphic text makes it clear that had the status of Municipium Eburum.

PontecagnanoNational Archaeological Museum of Pontecagnano “The Etruscans border”

The construction of the new National Archaeological Museum of Pontecagnano – founded by the Ministry of Heritage and Culture with the contribution and participation in the Campania Region and the local municipal government – is the final stage of an ambitious project led by the Superintendence for Archaeological Heritage the provinces of Salerno and Avellino in close collaboration with the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’ and with the University of Salerno, and configures itself within the exceptional importance of the archaeological heritage as it gathers the most significant Etruscan expansion in Southern Italy, returned from one of the most important site of ancient Campania and the South.
The new and larger premises in a strictly scientific, but shows at the same time charming and attractive, through the development of various issues, the results of the intense and constant research begun in 1964 in the municipality of Pontecagnano following the discovery of the most significant of the last fifty years, a large Etruscan settlement, which had urban characteristics as early as the Archaic.
The importance and the size of the site are documented by the rich more than 8000 funeral that attest the attendance of the First Iron Age (end of X – early ninth century BC) to Roman times, when the settlement Etruscan-Italic overlaps Picentia colony (263 BC). The main core of museum display is made up of princely outfits oriental period (late eighth-seventh century BC), at the peak flowering of the center.

certosa padula

Certosa of San Lorenzo in Padula

The Certosa of San Lorenzo is the largest monastic complex in Southern Italy as well as one of the most interesting in Europe for its architectural magnificence and abundance of artistic treasures. Construction work began in 1306 by the will of Tommaso Sanseverino, count of Marsico and lord of the Vallo di Diano, and continued, with extensions and renovations, until the nineteenth century. Few elements of the oldest structure remain in the Certosa: among these we remember the splendid door of the church dated to 1374 and the cross vaults of the church itself. The most important transformations date back to the mid-sixteenth century, after the Council of Trent. The gilding of the stuccoes of the church, the work of the lay brother Francesco Cataldi, are of the seventeenth century. The frescoes and changes in the use of existing environments are instead of the eighteenth century. The Carthusians left Padula in 1807, during the French decade of the Kingdom of Naples, when they were deprived of their possessions in Vallo, Cilento, Basilicata and Calabria. The rich furnishings and all the artistic and book heritage were almost entirely dispersed and the monument experienced a state of precariousness and abandonment. The extern area consists of a large rectangular courtyard around which most of the production activities were housed. The original sixteenth-century dress, made of local stone and rigidly marked by the Doric order of the coupled columns, was enriched in the Baroque period with statues and pinnacles. The Church, with a single nave with five chapels on the right side, is divided into two areas by a wall. Crossing the threshold, you find yourself in front of the spiral staircase that gently leads to the antechamber of the library. The large cloister, with its almost fifteen thousand square meters of surface, is among the largest in Europe. Construction began in 1583 by substantially redoing a pre-existing cloister.