La “strada ferrata”: paesaggi e archeologia della città bassa di Velia

The lower part of Velia settlement has been the subject of systematic archaeological investigations only since the mid-20th century. The paper offers some reflections on the landscape image of this part of the site, in order to grasp its transformations over time. A key to understanding, in this sense, is constituted by the railway line construction which characterizes the landscape, the relationship with archaeological evidence, the conservation strategies in two different moments, between the end of the 19th century and the middle of the 20th century. The data on the findings, during the 19th century investigations, are mainly due to the work of the young German scholar W. Schleuning, rather than to the Italian administration interventions. Some archival documents offer new elements on the 20th century route construction, for which little information was available up to now. In this way, it was possible to recover the role of P. C. Sestieri, Archaeological Superintendent, as well as his proposals to mitigate the impact on the archaeological structures of the ancient settlement that were beginning to be discovered in those years, changing the image of an exclusively agricultural landscape.