Location: Calabria Map
A modern small town can not be compared to the ancient Sybaris. It is located on the southern coast of Calabria, not far from Taranto. Greeks found the original city of Sybaris as a colony in 720 BC, but soon the city flourished and expanded quickly. Luxury and wealth of its citizens of Sybaris became so legendary that it gave us word “Sybaritic” today that describes lavish and extravagant lifestyle. In fact Crotone citizen got so jealous at the Sybaris’ wealth that it attacked and sacked beautiful city. A legend states that the horses of the city were taught to dance to music tunes for the sake of the amusement of their riders. Then Crotoniats found out about this weakness they brought musicians along with his army. Then the horses heard the tune they started to dance instead of attacking the enemy army. With the dancing cavalry out of way Crotoniats easily smashed the infantry with less festive horses and finished off the army of the Sybaris. Ruins of the ancient city of Sybaris today are known as park of the horses. Unfortunately much of wealth was stripped and the city with its people sold into slavery did not recover.
The Sibaritide area was the center of the Enotri
civilization, which flourished in the Iron Age, before being wiped
out by the Greek colonists who arrived from Achaia in 730-720 BC.
about. The Greeks defeated and reduced the locals to slavery, then
founded Sibari (Sybaris), the center of the area where goods from
Anatolia, in particular from Miletus, passed through. In ancient
times the wealth of Sibari was proverbial, but its fate was marked,
after the victory against Siris (allied to Crotone and Metaponto),
by the war against Crotone. The conflict was probably born for
reasons of commercial disputes and culminated with the Battle of
Nika (510 BC), which saw the victory of the Crotonians, the siege of
Sybaris and, seventy days later, its destruction, for which the
River Crati to pass over the ruins of the defeated city.
The
survivors of Sibari left for the motherland, where they obtained the
help of Athens to return to Calabria and found, in 444 BC. with
other new Athenian settlers, a new colony on the same site, later
called Turi. The new city layout was designed by the famous
architect and urban planner Ippodamo. However, the conflicts between
Sybarites and Athenians led to an internal conflict, which
culminated in the expulsion of the Sybarites.
In 194 BC the
city was founded again as a Roman colony with the name of Copiae,
which was soon changed back to Thurii. It continued to be in some
ways an important place, placed in a favorable position and in a
fruitful region, and it would seem that it was not completely
abandoned until the Middle Ages.
Later forgotten, its remains
were discovered excavated starting from 1932 and with particular
intensity since 1969. Various sites are still open today, so the
excavation is still far from being completed.
On January 18,
2013, a strong flood caused a flooding in the archaeological area of
Sibari, also due to local neglect. 20 thousand cubic meters of
water covered the entire archaeological park.
The protohistoric settlements are evidenced by some sites in the
area, such as Castiglione di Paludi, where there are the remains of
an Iron Age necropolis, dating back to the 9th-8th century BC.
The remains of the city unequivocally testify to the Hellenistic
rational layout of Hippodamus, with streets that intersect
orthogonally, while almost every trace of the previous city has
disappeared.
In the area of the "Parco del Cavallo" there
are some of the most significant remains, dating back to the Roman
age. It is a district organized into two large plateaus and a
theater.
In the areas "Prolungamento Strada" and "Casa
Bianca" there are other sections. "White House" in particular has a
built area of the fourth century BC, with a circular tower.
Finally, Stombi shows an urban area with mixed settlement, only
partially rebuilt after 510 BC, with some foundations from the
Archaic period, including a modest building, wells and furnaces.
Archaeological explorations in the
first half of the twentieth century were limited to some inspections
by Umberto Zanotti Bianco and, later, also by Paola Zancani
Montuoro, which had allowed to bring to light the remains of ancient
structures (essentially of the Roman age, dating back to Latin
colony of Copia, built on the site of Thurii) in the area of Parco
del Cavallo. Extensive and deep excavation campaigns were made
difficult by the conditions of the marshy ground and by the
outcropping aquifer, such as to require substantial technical
support for the suction and drainage of water. Only at the end of
the sixties of the twentieth century was it possible to launch a
systematic program of excavations in Sybaris and between 1969 and
1974 regular excavation campaigns were carried out, with essays in
the areas of Parco del Cavallo, Stombi, Prolungamento strada and
Casa Bianca.
In addition to the well-known remains of the
Roman age, they brought to light structures dating back to the
archaic and classical ages, therefore referable both to the archaic
Sybaris and to the subsequent settlements up to Thurii. The
materials, for the most part subject to processes of floating and
washout, corresponded to these chronological phases but also allowed
to go back to the last quarter of the eighth century BC. and,
therefore, at the time of the presumed foundation of Sibari, that
is, ~ 720 BC. They found confirmation and, later, were further
supported by the findings made in the areas immediately behind the
plain of Sibari, such as Francavilla Marittima (Timpone della Motta)
and Torre del Mordillo.
In the meantime, the intensification of surface research and
excavations in sites in northern Calabria has made it possible to
give ever greater consistency to the historical hypotheses
formulated on the ancient Sybaris and its "empire". Starting from
the end of the nineties and until today, a mission composed of
archaeologists from various Italian and foreign universities, from
the Italian Archaeological School of Athens and Greek archaeologists
has undertaken a project of regular excavations in Sibari, thanks to
which the archaeological knowledge of the site has expanded
enormously. Furthermore, archaeological research in the localities
located at the limits of the plain of Sibari had considerable
importance: sites such as Francavilla Marittima were known
archaeologically many decades before Sibari itself. In fact,
research conducted in 1879 and again in 1887 had led to the
discovery of a vast necropolis from the Iron Age, with rich
materials even prior to the age of Greek colonization, at the foot
of the hill.
Subsequently, extraordinary discoveries were
also made on the top (among other things, an important archaic Greek
inscription) relating to what in the Archaic and Classical age was a
Greek sanctuary dedicated to a female divinity (Hera, Athena?), But
previously it had been an inhabited area or, according to some
scholars, a place of worship for the local people who lived in the
area of the plain of Sibari before the arrival of the Greeks. The
archaeological finds of the ancient city are now kept in the
National Archaeological Museum of Sibaritide.