The museum sits across the road from the main archaeological area and is essential, not optional. The ground floor holds the metopes from the Sanctuary of Hera at the mouth of the Sele river — carved marble relief panels showing the Labours of Hercules and scenes from the Trojan cycle, brightly original even after 2,500 years. Upstairs is the room everyone comes for: the Tomb of the Diver.
Discovered in 1968, the Tomb of the Diver is a painted burial chamber from around 480 BC. The five slabs that formed the walls and ceiling were all painted on their inner faces — a symposium scene on the walls, athletes, flute players, a couple in embrace. But it is the ceiling panel that stops you: a single human figure in the air above a stylized sea, diving. There is nothing else like it in the Greek world. The figurative wall painting of classical antiquity survives almost nowhere; here it survives complete, on a set of slabs that happened to be sealed underground for two and a half millennia.