National Archaeological Museum of Pontecagnano

The museum

The museum, dedicated to and named after the “Etruscans of the Frontier”, collects artifacts from the Villanovan and Etruscan-Campanian center of Pontecagnano, a southern outpost of the original populations of central Italy.

The only state museum in the Salerno’Salerno area, the Pontecagnano museum preserves a priceless heritage from the settlement that developed in the area from the 9th century B.C.

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The most substantial core of the collection is the artifacts from the more than 10,000 burials excavated in the necropolises.

Exhibition Trail

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The route runs chronologically, narrating the long history of the area from the earliest evidence of prehistoric times to the founding of the Roman city of Picentia. The exhibition offers visitors moments of insight into the city and its urban development, necropolis, sanctuaries and craft productions.

Significant is the section devoted to the aristocracies of the Orientalizing period, between the end of the 8th and the end of the 7th century BC. A number of burials that have been called “princely” burials due to the composition and quality of the grave goods are referable to this period,

The’exhibition is divided into six sections:

1. The Prehistory – The Copper Age

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2. The Early Iron Age

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3. The City of Princes – The Orientalizing

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4. The Archaic City

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5. The Classical and Hellenistic Age

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6. The Roman Age

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Inaugurated in2007,the museum makes use of numerous modern educational apparatus, graphic reconstructions, settings, reproductions of objects and burials.

Treasures to Discover

• Kotyle of the “Bad Wolf Painter” – 6th century B.C. (tomb 856)

At the beginning of the 6th century B.C. immigrant potters from Etruria arrived in Pontecagnano, starting a production of figurative and imitation ceramics from the Greek city of Corinth. Two workshops can be distinguished on the basis of style, each working under the close dependence of an aristocratic family. The Bad Wolf Painter is distinguished by originality in the rendering of subjects and reinterpretation of iconographic schemes.

• Elmo of configured impasto – end of 9th century B.C. (sporadic)

The d’impasto helmet has human figurines in the round at the top, with the head, torso, and extremities considerably developed. The somewhat reduced limbs indicate that the two figures are depicted seated. The slightly taller figure on the left is female: the presence of breasts and a thin braid down her back show this. The woman, perhaps a deity, encircles the male figure rendered with a massive head covered with a headdress. The man is most likely the deceased who is accompanied on his journey to the’Afterlife.

Curiosities / to know

• The cave tombs of Pontecagnano

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In the western area of Pontecagnano, on the left side of the Picentino River, a necropolis has been found with burials that attest to a stable occupation of the area as early as the Aeneolithic Age. The tombs, of the grotto type, consisted of an access shaft in which ritual sacrifices took place and a burial cell in which the deceased were deposited with grave goods.

• The Villanovan center

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With the arrival of people from Etruria came the settlement of Pontecagnano, which, along with Capua and Sala Consilina, is one of the ‘Villanovan’ centers in Campania, characterized by the Etruscan ritual of incineration. The combusted remains of the deceased were deposited in large biconical ossuaries, with helmet-shaped lids for men and bowls for women. The settlement is at the center of a trade circuit involving the entire Mediterranean, as shown by objects from Sardinia, Sicily, Greece, Egypt and the Middle East.

• The ancient Picentia

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In 268 BC, on the site of the Etruscan-Campanian settlement, the Romans founded Picentia. A rebellious city, it rebelled at the time of Hannibal’s invasion, after which the Romans founded the colony of Salernum to control the territory, and during the Social War (90-89 BC), when it suffered violent destruction. Now devoid of administrative autonomy, the settlement continued to be inhabited until the fifth century AD.