Military Hospital – Historical Garden – Roman Chapel

One of the most interesting archaeological treasures of Taranto can be found surrounded by the thick vegetation of the Historic Garden of the Military Hospital. This place includes part of the properties of the Villino di Santa Lucia (wanted by Mons.Capocelatro in the last years of the 1700s), and is enriched by some decorative statues among which the most interesting one is the couple of lions made of stone.

The room was found in 1901 and is datable in all probability to the late Republican age (II-I century BC). The details about its realization process are still unknown. Nevertheless, it is characterized by a single rectangular room of about ten square meters. The structure is not isolated and it’s connected to other ones for which it is not possible, at least at the moment, to put forward any hypothesis. The walls, with an irregular external side, are still covered, on the inside, by a layer of plaster with some painted vertical red bands decorations.

Along the internal walls there are some trapezoidal pillars on a molded base. Only one of them retains a decoration representing a lighted torch, symbolizing the dedication of this place of worship to a divinity linked to the afterlife.

In the center of the small room there is an altar almost certainly erected using reused materials.

The total lack of proven archaeological material and written sources could not guarantee the possibility of univocally identifying the deity to whom the suggestive sacred place was dedicated.