Museo archeologico lametino

The museum collects archaelogical finds from the Lamezia plain in order to reconstruct the millennial history of an extraordinarily important area between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Sea. It is housed since 2010 on the first floor of the S. Domenico complex in Nicastro, a former convent founded between 1506 and 1521, where the philosopher Tommaso Campanella deepened his theological studies.The museum is divided into three sections.The Prehistoric Section displays materials from the Lower Paleolithic Age (1.8 million-100,000 years ago) until the Middle Bronze Age (about 1600-1400 BC), as stone tools, ceramic fragments and bone fragments. It is of considerable interest the set of choppers (tools made by chipping pebbles) from Casella di Maida, where the oldest prehistoric station of Calabria was identified. The section includes a didactic laboratory with a life-size reconstruction of a furnace for Neolithic pots.The Classical Section consists of two rooms. The first one shows documents of the earliest interaction of Greeks in the Lamezia area and the subsequent foundation of Terina, a colony of Crotone, located by the scholars in the area of Sant'Eufemia Vetere. Treasures of Magno-Greek coins and epigraphic documents on bronze tablets are of particular interest. The second room is dedicated to artifacts from the Hellenistic period, collected during archaeological investigations carried out in Iardini di Renda, and artifacts from the Roman period. In the Medieval Section post-classical material is exhibited from the Byzantine period up to the 18th century. It comes from excavations made in the little Church of SS. Quaranta Martiri, in the Benedictine Abbey of S. Maria di S. Eufemia and in the Castle of Nicastro.