In 1752 a British traveler, Lascelles Raymond Iremonger, on his grand tour, described the contrast between the startling immensity of the Greek Doric temples at Paestum and the unpleasantness of their architecture and, most of all, the disproportion of their baseless columns:

Iremonger was not the only one with such an opinion. In the second half of the 18th century, just after the rediscovery of these temples in southern Italy, many visitors expressed their bewilderment with the unfamiliar proportions of the three buildings (Fig. 1). The Baron d’Hancarville wrote about the temples, “In the midst of [these] ruins stand three Edifices of a sort of architecture whose Members are Dorick, altho’ its proportions are not so.”

Why were these proportions thought to be so strange? The temples, the oldest to be found on Italian soil, were very different from Roman classical architecture and from buildings travelers had seen before in publications and at other sites. We now know that what the 18th-century visitors called the Temple of Neptune (now named Temple of Hera II and dated c. 460 BC), the Temple of Ceres (Temple of Athena, c. 520 BC), and the Basilica (Temple of Hera I, c. 530 BC) were the creations of Greek colonists who had founded Poseidonia in 600 BC (the city was renamed Paestum after the Roman conquest of 273 BC). Towards the end of the 18th century, in a comparative plate in his publication Les Ruines de Paestum (1799), the French architect Claude- Mathieu Delagardette showed how dissimilar the proportions of the Paestum temples were from those of other Greek Doric monuments, notably the Parthenon, the Temple of Theseus, the Propylaea in Athens and the Thorieion temple, and Roman ones that included a Roman Doric order, including the Theater of Marcellus and the Coliseum in Rome (Fig. 2).

Compared to other Greek or Roman buildings those of Paestum featured exceptionally short and thick baseless columns with a pronounced entasis and flat, unusually wide capitals. The columns were densely placed next to each other, and, in addition, the building material used at Paestum was a rough and porous limestone, rather than a smooth marble. All these elements added to the awkward impression the temples made on their 18th-century visitors.