City
Tarento
Taranto
Listen to the story
Tarentum, now Taranto, was the only Spartan colony in Magna Graecia, the Greek south of Italy, founded in 706 BC on a small peninsula with two natural harbours. The map gives it the usual pair of towers. When the city was walled and greatly enlarged in the fifth century BC, its cemeteries ended up inside the walls, something so unusual that an oracle had to justify it. Rome captured the town in 209 BC, and under the emperors writers praised it as a quiet place with a mild climate, made for leisure. The twenty miles the map gives towards Manduria should probably read twenty-five.