Road workers modernizing a street in 1983 uncovered the remains of the second-oldest synagogue found in Italy, a fourth-to-sixth-century building whose thirty-square-meter mosaic floor still carries a menorah, a shofar, an etrog and palm branch, and a Solomon's knot worked in tesserae.
Archaeologists first mistook the two-chamber structure for a Roman villa until the Jewish symbols surfaced. Only the Ostia Antica synagogue near Rome is older. The finds and a reconstruction of the mosaic are displayed at the small on-site Museo Archeoderi, part of an archaeological park now managed by Calabria's regional museum authority, and a rabbi from the small local Jewish community sometimes leads tours of the site.
