Across the broad, wheat-gilded plateau of the Tavoliere di Puglia, between the foothills of the Apennines and the Adriatic horizon, an ancient city lies mostly buried and largely forgotten. Herdonia—called, with both admiration and melancholy, ‘la Pompei di Puglia (Pompeii of Puglia)’—witnessed the catastrophe of Cannae, the armies of Hannibal, the glory of Trajan’s highway (Via Traiana), the slow twilight of late antiquity, and the hunting lodges of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Swabia.
Only twenty per cent of its twenty-hectare urban fabric has been investigated in six decades of intermittent excavation, and the remaining eighty per cent still waits, intact, beneath the thin Puglian soil. This article synthesizes the full arc of research at Herdonia—from its Daunian origins in the Iron Age through the most recent initiatives for its recovery as a public archaeological park—and makes the case for the site’s singular importance to the archaeology of ancient Italy.
