When, in the '700, the first travelers visited the site of Paestum, they did not know what to think of the Doric temples, their severe and archaic style.

But precisely the otherness of these buildings, and of the community that built them, are the basis of the fascination that the Great-Greek site has exercised since then.

The amazement experienced by eighteenth-century travelers before the testimonies of the classical world was destined to repeat itself until the present: the Scolptio frieze of the first temple of Hera on the Sele river, the Tomb of the Diver, the bronze vases from the Heroon... works now on display in the museum that question and irritate the observer, talking about a world gone, "totally alien" to our gaze, as Johann Wolfgang Goethe wrote. A world, however, which also reserves a message for the future: the variety of forms of life, art, politics, thought, love that we find in history, shows: another world is possible.