Word: paestum
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...total, adoring immersion in the ideal of the Antique, are lost to us; try as we may, we cannot feel the reverence for it that he did. For Canova, the Antique was a truth mine. He visited every ancient site in Italy he could get to -- Naples, Paestum, the newly excavated sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum; his connections gave him access to private hoards of statuary from Rome to Venice...
...Greek temples of Paestum are surrounded by umbrella pines and artichoke fields, and until recently artichokes were the main preoccupation of Farmer Luigi Franco and his son Francesco. Not any more. Last July Francesco broke a plow on what turned out to be the limestone roof of an ancient Lucanian tomb. Such tombs, decorated with the crude paintings of the local tribesmen who made them, have been found before in southern Italy. But this one was different. When excavated by Archaeologist Mario Napoli, superintendent of antiquities for the district of Salerno, the walls of the tomb were found...
...next five months, Professor Napoli unearthed 109 individual tombs with 212 painted panels. Many Greek vase paintings have survived from antiquity, and much Roman wall painting is copied from Greek originals. But the Paestum frescoes, in the opinion of many experts, are the only examples of classical Greek wall painting that have yet been found...
...elegant compositions of great vitality in the early classical style. Figures seen in profile are enclosed in lines of exquisite purity, then colored with a few flat shades of red, black, green, yellow ochre and terracotta. Professor Napoli believes Greek artists painted them for their Lucanian overlords, who conquered Paestum around 400 B.C. and then fell under the spell of its culture...
Saved by Swamp. Oddly enough, Farmer Franco's artichokes helped preserve the 2,300-year-old frescoes from the destruction that has overtaken other Greek mural painting. The Paestum paintings were preserved because its river silted up and turned the area into a malarial swamp. For centuries, moisture seeping into the tombs from the swampy waters kept the paint from drying up and flaking off the stone walls. When the swamps were filled in 1944, the roots of the artichokes continued to keep the tombs moist...