Blanda: the Palècastro and San Brancato

For centuries no one knew where Blanda was, the city named by Pliny, Ptolemy and Livy and marked as a station on the Peutinger Table and the Antonine Itinerary. Camillo Pellegrino in the 17th century looked for it at Maratea, Gabriele Barrio saw it at Belvedere Marittimo; only in 1891 did the historian Michele Lacava place it near Tortora, and the excavations led from 1990 by Gioacchino Francesco La Torre for the Superintendency have confirmed it beyond doubt on the Palècastro hill and in the district of San Brancato.

At San Brancato more than 120 Oenotrian and Lucanian tombs have come to light with grave goods of Italic vases and a few imports from the Greek colonies, together with the large early Christian church with a central plan and three apses, surrounded by burials, built in the 6th–7th century when Blanda was a bishop’s see and used until the 12th century. On the Palècastro, where the mighty Lucanian wall was already visible, the Roman city that lived between the 1st century BC and the 5th AD has emerged: two streets crossing at right angles, the insulae of the houses, the forum with the plinth of a monument dedicated to the duumvir Marcus Arrius Clymenus and three small temples of the Capitoline Triad, built in the reconstruction that followed the earthquake of around 70 BC. At the foot of the hill remains the lower part of a monumental mausoleum, while the cisterns and fountains that supplied the city with water lie beneath state road 18. Blanda covered barely five hectares, but from here two duumvirs administered a wide territory with its shoreline.