Three Doric temples standing in open fields with no city around them — that is Paestum's core experience, and it is unlike almost anything else in Europe. When you arrive, the scale takes a moment to register. These are not ruins in the usual sense: the columns are upright, the entablatures largely intact, and in the case of the Temple of Neptune you can walk between the columns into the interior. The plain around them is flat and quiet, with mountains to the east and the sea just out of sight to the west.
Visitor numbers here are a fraction of what you'd find at Pompeii. On a weekday morning in April you may have the southern temple complex — the two great temples side by side — nearly to yourself. The museum across the road deserves at least two hours on its own; it holds the Tomb of the Diver, one of the most remarkable objects in all of Italian archaeology, along with the metopes, sculpture, and painted tomb slabs that give the temples their fuller context.