We started out the day by picking up Domenico's friends Luigi, a lawyer who still lives in Calabria, and Davide, who lives in Rome and I have met once or twice before here.
Our first stop was the ancient town of Terina, a Greek 6th century settlement and one of the cities that fell within the region of Magna Grecia, the term the Romans coined for extended Greek territory, mostly in Southern Italy and Sicily. The site was discovered in the mid-nineties by a farmer in the midst of his olive trees, which still surround the site. Domenico and his high school class assisted the archaeologists in the early excavations in 1997-8. They found a small settlement with a few houses centered around a main street. They rebuilt one of the walls of the house so that the shape of the house became obvious. The most important discovery made there was an amphora full of coins, some representing a nymph and others the goddess Nike.
When we arrived at the site there was little left other than a wood picket fence encircling a field which had obviously been dug up at one point but now has been left for so long that it is hard to discern what was once there. We walked around for a few minutes and Domenico explained what he had done with his class and how it was such a shame that it was just sitting there without any more excavations when obviously more could be found. The initial dig only went down about three feet or so and found a considerable number of amphorae, coins and other small instruments. But, sadly, money ran out and they had to stop and I guess have been unable to get any more funding. In our five minutes walking around the site we found bits of two amphorae sticking out of the ground that appeared to be attached to a larger vessel still buried beneath, as well as a few shards of black painted pottery.
The photo at the top show the current state of the site, really not much to look at for something that had so much promise at the beginning.
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