Paestum, on Italy’s western coast south of Naples, was founded as the Greek colony of Poseidonia around 600 BC before later coming under Lucanian and then Roman control. It is famous today for having three of the best-preserved Greek Doric temples anywhere in the world, including outside Greece itself: the Temple of Hera I (“the Basilica”), the Temple of Hera II (long misidentified as a Temple of Neptune/Poseidon), and the Temple of Athena. The site also preserves an unusual and important set of painted tombs, most notably the Tomb of the Diver, whose lid depicts a young man diving into water, widely interpreted as a symbolic image of passage from life to death, and one of the rare surviving examples of Greek figural painting from this period. [Editor’s note: this page did not appear on the original site at all. This paragraph was drafted as a placeholder using general reference sources and should be reviewed/expanded by Dr. Siegel.]