Word: sestieri
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Dates: during 1954-1954
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...city's long history and its conquest by Lucanians and Romans were well known from classical literature, and its walls and colonnades have impressed tourists for centuries, but not until 1951 was there a serious attempt to find what lay beneath the surface. Then Professor P. Claudio Sestieri and a gang of laborers set to work (TIME, Sept. 6). From tombs came vivid paintings on stone of household scenes and fighting gladiators. Last summer Sestieri uncovered a small, completely buried building, made a hole in its roof and lowered himself into the stagnant dimness. He was in the central...
After World War II, intense, earnest Professor Pellegrino Sestieri, head archaeologist of Salerno and Potenza provinces, convinced a reluctant Italian government that a unique record of Greek and post-Greek civilization might well lie beneath the stones. In 1951, under a $480,000 government grant (made possible by Marshall Plan aid), he started digging with a crew of 46 workmen, and soon found evidence to support his educated guess. Among his rich preliminary finds: a colored, life-size terra-cotta statue of a god, probably Zeus adorned with a thin, Dali-like mustache; a rare, ten-inch nude model...
Honeyed Goddess. Last month Digger Sestieri hit real pay dirt. His workers broke into Paestum's "sacred precinct," surrounded by a wall of massive square boulders. Inside they found a small, hut-shaped temple. The interior walls were of stucco; on the floor were a rust-corroded iron bedstead and a set of ornate, gilded bronze water jars. Each jar, decorated with figures of female heads, sphinxes, rams and serpents, was filled with an amber-colored, resinlike substance: solidified honey. Presumably distilled from the nectar of Paestum's famed roses, the 2,500-year-old honey...
...Sestieri pressed on, uncovered about 25 kennel-shaped tombs, each six feet long by a yard wide. Outwardly identical with Greek tombs elsewhere in Paestum, these sepulchers were distinguished by livelier and peculiarly individualistic interior paintings of chariot races, departing warriors, gladiators. Sestieri's conclusion: the conquering Lucanians not only took over the Greeks' city, but pre-empted their tombs as well. Executed by Greek artists under Lucanian orders, the sepulchral paintings, he believes, indicate the existence of a previously unknown style of early Italian...
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