October
09
/ 2023
The ancient Greek city of Poseidonia, now Paestum, lies on the Italian coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea. Paestum, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is famed for its well-preserved ruins. In fact, posterity owes a debt of gratitude to its swampy marshlands for helping preserve some of the earliest examples of Doric architecture in the Greek world. It was due to the wetlands that malaria would emerge making the area inhospitable to human life, thus all but abandoned for roughly 1,000 years, from the fall of the ancient world in the fourth century AD through the Middle Ages. During a time when Greek temples were systematically dismantled and quarried for their stone, the Doric temples of Paestum were largely forgotten and
