Greek Temples of Paestum
— the gold a Greek temple keeps for evening.
Not only on a wall.
“Three Doric temples on a flat coastal plain south of Salerno, standing since the Greeks called this city Poseidonia. The middle one, the so-called Temple of Neptune, is among the best preserved anywhere, six columns across the front, the limestone warmed to honey where the afternoon reaches it. Built before the Romans renamed the place, before Goethe stopped to write about them. Wild fennel and poppies grow up through the old streets between them. Most coaches stop at Pompeii and never come this far down. The ones who do tend to stay until the light goes.
Greek Temples of Paestum, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Paestum sits on the coastal plain of the Sele River, in the frazione of the same name within the comune of Capaccio Paestum, about 40 kilometres south of Salerno in Campania. Greek colonists from Sybaris founded it as Poseidonia around 600 BC, naming the city for Poseidon. The Lucanians took it in the late fifth century BC, and Rome absorbed it in 273 BC, giving it the name Paestum. Three Doric temples, a forum, an amphitheatre, and long stretches of the old city walls survive on the site. In 1998 UNESCO inscribed it alongside Velia, the Certosa di Padula, and the Cilento and Vallo di Diano National Park.
Three temples stand in a row, built of the honey-coloured travertine quarried nearby. The oldest, the Temple of Hera I, went up around 550 BC; for centuries locals called it the Basilica, with nine columns across its short ends and eighteen down each side. Beside it, the Temple of Hera II, mislabelled the Temple of Neptune in the 18th century, dates to about 460 BC and measures roughly 25 by 60 metres, its columns just under nine metres tall. The archaeologist A. W. Lawrence called it the best preserved of all Greek temples. The third, the Temple of Athena from around 500 BC, mixes Doric columns outside with Ionic ones within.
The travertine carries iron and other minerals that warm as the sun drops, so the columns read pale at midday and deepen to gold and amber toward evening. That colour is part of why the ruins drew Grand Tour travellers after a road built in the mid-1700s brought them back into view. Goethe came in 1787 and described the temples in his Italian Journey, at first unsettled by their heavy Doric mass, then won over. Piranesi etched them near the end of his life. The warm stone against the flat green plain, with the Tyrrhenian close by, is what most photographers wait for in the last hour before the site closes.