Lametine Archaeological Museum

The Lametine Archaeological Museum is an archaeological museum based in the city of Lamezia Terme in the province of Catanzaro in Calabria.

It collects artifacts from surface reconnaissance, excavation campaigns and fortuitous discoveries made in the Lametine plain, with the aim of reconstructing the millenary history of what was once a strategic territory on the isthmus road between the Ionian and Tyrrhenian.

The Museum has been housed since 2010 on the first floor of the Complex of S. Domenico in Nicastro, near the Corso Numistrano. It is a former convent of the Dominican fathers founded between 1506 and 1521, where the famous philosopher Tommaso Campanella deepened his theological studies. The entire structure, rebuilt after the devastating earthquake of 1638 by the Princes of Aquinas and equipped with an upper floor only at the end of the nineteenth century, was the subject of careful restoration work completed in 2006.

The Museum is divided into three sections: Prehistoric, Classical and Medieval.

The Prehistoric Section displays stone tools, ceramic fragments and bone remains dating from the Lower Paleolithic (1.8 million-100,000 years ago) and the Middle Bronze Age (about 1600-1400 BC).

Of particular interest is the nucleus of choppers (instruments made by splintering pebbles) of the Lower Paleolithic from Casella di Maida, in which the oldest prehistoric station in Calabria has been identified. Important evidence of the Neolithic period are, however, the ceramic fragments characterized by a great variety of impressed decorations, coming from the excavations carried out in the Curinga plain.

In the section there is a didactic laboratory of experimental archeology, with the life-size reconstruction of a furnace for cooking Neolithic vases.

---

Archaeological museum opening hours:

from Tuesday to Saturday

Morning: from 8.30 to 13.00;

Afternoon: from 15.30 to 18.00.
Saturday: 09:00 to 12:30

Map: Lametine Archaeological Museum