This series has recently completed fifteen volumes on the pinakes of Locri Epizephyrii and two on the Heraion at Paestum. This most recent volume is a particularly valuable contribution on a site whose history is tantalising. Famous for healthy living and its athletes, Croton gradually fades from our texts, but we now have an excellent tool for understanding its archaeology.

S. gives a brisk introduction, with reference to some recent work: the city seems from its origin as a colony to have demonstrated a clear understanding of spatial division and distribution, but we can also see an indigenous urbanistic plan pre-existing the colony. The castello probably overlies the acropolis, and the port, or at least one of the harbours, was nearby. Important and impressive sixth-century finds in the south-west area (including walls made of blocks showing anathyrosis) have suggested high quality domestic buildings. There is possible evidence of the agora, stronger evidence for pottery workshops, and signs of a fourth-century rebuilding after the end of the Dionysian tyranny and before the Bruttian takeover.

The following essays, usefully accompanied by English abstracts, cover this and more ground in further detail. Racheli gives details of excavations of a sacred area near the Banca d'Italia and domestic architecture near the Banca Popolare, and the houses are likely to be significant for the way we see the history of Greek-style housing in Italy. The houses are on a sloping terrace down to the sea and seem to show a similar pattern, and respect the original allotments through the phases from the sixth century to the Hellenistic period. Evidence of water management and drainage is clear. These houses come to an abrupt end in the third century and are replaced by pottery workshops. A necropolis occupied the space from the first to fourth centuries a.d. and the site is abandoned in the fifth century a.d., with some medieval resettlement in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Verbicaro then builds on this material with a consideration of a series of excavations and finds from the 1970s, with a number of houses, and pottery workshops in the area of the Campo Sportivo. Verbicaro sees this as the centre of the colony, and the fourth-century pottery workshops as an indication of prosperity after a difficult fifth century. Again the archaeological evidence from this area becomes scarce for the third century b.c. onwards.

Lippolis and Stocco consider an area of industrial expansion (ex-Montedison), which was clearly an archaeological challenge owing to soil pollution and disruption. This area is some way out of the core of the city, and only shows significant settlement in the archaic and classical period, with a major road running parallel to the coast. It then seems to have been abandoned. We perhaps see a city developing different zones, with this area reflecting the aftermath of the destruction of Sybaris and a re-dimensioning of the city. This is reversed in the period either side of the Hannibalic War.

Aversa and Verbicaro study 62 burials from the Carrara area, almost all inhumations, with low quantity but high quality pottery grave goods; they suggest aristocratic restraint. Ruga takes us into the Roman period, and combines the archaeological evidence with the foundation of the Roman colony in 194–192 b.c. after the Hannibalic War, in which Croton had backed the loser. Ruga makes a strong case for the area around the sanctuary of Hera Lacinia at Capo Colonna being the site of the Roman colony, and this then explains in part the relative weakness of the old centre of Croton, as described above. Evidence of houses along the classic lines familiar from Pompeii and elsewhere, and substantial amounts of pottery, attest to a colony which was operational despite unrest and destruction at the time of Spartacus and Sextus Pompey. A luxurious domus built subsequently indicates recovery. By this time, the two separate communities of Crotone and the Lakinion had probably merged, and there is a steady shift back to the old centre. This fascinating story has much to tell us about processes of Roman colonisation.

D'Annibale and Carter take us into the countryside and this article needs to be read alongside their exemplary work at Metapontum. The survey work bears out much of what has been demonstrated in the archaeology of the centres; a prehistoric network, a flourishing agricultural economy near Crotone in the sixth and fourth centuries, but very little near the Lakinion, a trend which was reversed with the Roman colony, and then, perhaps more surprising, a strong late-antique presence with 190 sites across the whole hinterland from the fifth to the seventh centuries a.d.

Aversa offers a study of architectural terracottas and roofs in the settlement areas, tracing a history either side of the great marble roof of the sanctuary of Hera Lacinia, famously looted by Fulvius Flaccus in 173 b.c.

The second part of the volume considers individual types or groups of material. Lattanzi considers the sixth- to fifth-century b.c. bronze votives which were collected by Charles Townley and are now in the British Museum. She is sceptical about the idea of a ‘scuola di Krotone’ but situates them in the broader south Italian context; whereas S. is rather more positive about the Crotonian origin of two bronze askoi in the shape of a siren and a terracotta fragment of a Gorgon with a similar body shape. Muleo studies in detail a seventh-century b.c. bronze griffin's head from a cauldron, showing its east Greek influences.

In the reign of Antoninus Pius, the family of Manius Megonius Leo dedicated statue bases (ILS 6468–71) and equestrian bronze statues, fragments of which have survived and show the paludamentum and calcei patricii, at Petelia (Strongoli) in the territory of Crotone. This dossier is presented by Belli Pasqua, with an emphasis on the authorisation of the dedications, and the local munificence of the family.

Three articles (Arslan, Ruga, S.) touch on a hoard of coins and jewellery from the Fondo Gesù, found in 2005, predominantly from the fourth to third centuries b.c., from an area of mercantile and artisanal activity near the port and the river. The coins show the economic importance of Macedonia and Epirus into the third century, and then financial problems for third-century Crotone, both in the coinage and also in the fact of the deposition of the hoard, at a time of acute uncertainty. It is interesting to read this account of sophisticated economic exchange and high quality gold work alongside Cristiano's account of the more or less contemporary bronze belts from the Italic areas to the north, some of them repaired in antiquity, as an indication perhaps of their continuing value, symbolic or otherwise.

To conclude the volume, Guzzo discusses a luxurious textile himation dedicated to Hera Lacinia (ps.-Arist. Mir. Ausc. 96; Athen. 12.541a). Lazzarini publishes an inscription found in the area of the Roman houses at Capo Colonna, but preceding them, with a decree honouring an individual with a crown, and tentatively suggests that this is contemporary with the apparent evidence for the shift of eponymous magistrate from demiorgos to iereus. Finally, Caruso offers a helpful account of the Pythagorean Mouseia in Magna Graecia. It is likely that the Crotonian example, which we know from the sources, was near the agora, which returns us neatly to S.'s initial chapter on where that might be.

The volume is superbly illustrated and has a separate box of high quality maps. This is an essential volume for the study of Crotone, which touches on many topics of southern Italian history. One would like to have had more on the Bruttii, and more on the later and post-Roman period, but this because the standard of what is here is so high. Both the contributors and the editors are to be congratulated on a landmark publication.