Venosa

Venosa sits in the Vulture hills, ninety kilometers east of Salerno. The Romans founded Venusia here in 291 BC as a colony on the Appian Way, and it became the birthplace of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, the poet Horace, in 65 BC. The Parco Archeologico preserves a Roman amphitheater, the baths, and mosaic floors, alongside the so-called Casa di Orazio.

Above the ruins stands the Abbazia della Santissima Trinità, an eleventh-century Benedictine complex begun in 1059, with its walls built from blocks salvaged out of the Roman amphitheater next door. The Incompiuta, the unfinished thirteenth-century cathedral expansion immediately behind the abbey, is roofless and visibly stitched together from Roman fragments. The town centre is dominated by the Castello di Pirro del Balzo, built in 1470 on the foundations of an earlier cathedral and modelled on the Maschio Angioino in Naples. Venosa is at the heart of the Aglianico del Vulture DOC and DOCG zone, the great red of southern Italy, grown on the volcanic slopes of nearby Monte Vulture.