Policoro

Policoro sits on the Ionian coast of Basilicata where the Agri river reaches the sea. The modern town is built on and around the site of Heraclea (Eraclea Lucana), a Greek polis founded in 433 BC by Taras (Taranto) and Thurii as a joint colony. The archaeology and the coast now function as two halves of the same place: the excavated city and its museum inland, the beach and the forest reserve running along the shore just beyond it.

The Gulf of Taranto shoreline gives the town its second identity, with the Bandiera Blu recognition sitting alongside the Bosco Pantano reserve, which the WWF describes as the most important coastal-forest reserve south of Tuscany. The Tavole di Eraclea, recovered from the polis and now held in the museum, recorded the city's own regulations on land tenure, a detail that ties the ancient settlement to the same agricultural plain the town still farms. Policoro is the agricultural anchor of the Metapontino plain, growing strawberries, kiwi, and melons, and is one of Basilicata's few year-round-resident coastal communes. A Greek colony, a Roman battlefield, a working beach, and a farming town turn out to be the same stretch of ground, still worked and still inhabited rather than left as ruins.