"Vidi Paestano gaudere rosaria cultu"

     

    The Latin poet, in a work attributed to Ausonius, wrote of Virgil's morning walk and compared the rose garden before his eyes to the famous roses of Paestum, considered an excellence of the time. Martial also used the roses of Paestum as a benchmark to describe the beauty of the subjects depicted in his works: "lips as red as the roses of Paestum" or "the breath of the girl like the scent of a Paestum rose garden." Campania, Pliny tells us, was the area of the empire that produced large quantities of perfumes, and an ancient workshop dedicated to the production of scented essences has been found near Paestum itself. This type of production required huge quantities of petals from the flower dedicated to Venus, and for this reason, rose gardens characterized the landscape of the ancient city.

    The fame of these bifera roses, which bloom twice a year, was such that it survived the end of their cultivation and the loss of the rose gardens. In modern times, the Superintendent for Archaeological Heritage of Salerno and the Cilento and Vallo di Diano Park have decided to recover this flower by trying to recreate it from species that must have been similar (unfortunately, we have no DNA or certain data on the original species), to replant it in the excavations.