Sicily Day 4: Segesta & Motya
Today, we left Palermo behind, and traveled back in time 2500 years, to Sicily's ancient Greek and Phoenician past.
Our day started with a beautiful drive west along the coast from Palermo to Segesta. As we left the big city, the suburbs gradually thinned out, until we were driving through a hilly landscape planted with grapes and olives and bright yellow melons.
Our first glimpse of Segesta, an ancient Greek settlement nestled in the midst of the fertile hills, was its beautiful, nearly-intact Doric temple, made of golden limestone and perched on the top of a hill overlooking the modern highway, surrounded by olive groves and fields.
As we pulled into the parking lot, we saw a number of other motor coaches parked there, and the staging area at the base of the temple hill, with its shops and restrooms, was swarming with other tourists. Segesta is a popular day-trip from Palermo, since it's only a 90-minute drive away.
Professor Bob suggested we first visit the Greek theater, cut high into a hillside some distance from the temple. He guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that most of the other visitors would have left by the time we finished touring the theater, since the day-trippers would have a lunch scheduled for them at noon.
The archaeological park at Segesta runs a shuttle bus service between the parking lot and the Greek theater, which takes visitors up an extremely steep, extremely winding, one-lane road. For obvious reason, no private vehicles are allowed on this road, but some people chose to walk.
It was another warm, sunny day, but there was a nice cool breeze blowing off the sea, which we could see in the distance, part of the theater's spectacular view. The theater is very-well preserved, with tiers of limestone seats marching down to the stage area. Behind the stage, you look over golden-green hills and vineyards, mountains and blue water.
When we finished our tour of the theater, and the shuttle bus had deposited us back down at the staging area, we discovered that Professor Bob had been right on the money. The milling crowd of tourists surrounding the souvenir stands and picnic tables had now vanished, leaving our group free to climb the hill up to the temple.
Up close, the great roofless structure, with its banks of weathered columns, was even more impressive. Bob gave a short lecture pointing out the salient architectural details, showing how the temple was both very similar to the Parthenon in Athens, and also what design features were unique to Sicilian Greek buildings.
Finally, he made a case for the fact that the temple had likely never been completed--for example, there's no evidence that it was ever roofed, the columns were left unfluted and with unfinished bases, and the temple is lacking a pavement floor--instead, it's just dirt with embedded construction rubble. So, it appears as if the builders finished 85% of the temple before the project was abandoned.
It's a striking sight, a symmetry of ancient columns surrounded by pine and olive trees. While we were strolling the temple perimeter, a flock of magpies swooped in and out of the roofless temple, calling loudly, competing with rasping sounds of crickets in the warm noon.
Somewhat reluctantly, we departed Segesta and headed down to the island of Motya, located near Marsala in the northwestern part of Sicily. The island once housed a substantial Phoenician settlement, who were enemies and chief economic rivals of the ancient Greeks in Sicily.
We had a leisurely seafood lunch in an open-air restaurant on the quay where the tiny ferries depart for Motya, which featured an outstanding first course of a variety of local seafood--an octopus and celery salad, paper-thin slices of fish both smoked and raw, a fresh sardine in olive oil and garlic, and a piece of grilled tuna.
This was so good that the second course, a couscous dish topped with chunks of swordfish, suffered by comparison. For dessert, fresh grapes and some of the bright-yellow melons which are in season and are being sold by the side of the road everywhere, often from the beds of pickup trucks.
The sea is really shallow here, and salt evaporation ponds have been set up, with picturesque windmills to pump seawater into the pools. All around the windmills are great heaps of shining white salt. As we watched, we saw a couple of workers covering up one of the salt mounds with old terracotta roof tiles laid in overlapping rows, presumably to protect the salt from a rainstorm.
The island of Motya is only a few hundred yards off the coast--you could practically swim or wade over--and the ferry ride takes about 6-7 minutes. It's a low island made of sandstone and sandy soil, covered with short scrubby brush near the shore, and with olive groves and vineyards in the center. It's also really small--we walked from one end of the island to the other in about 15 minutes.
Of interest there is a Phoenician trading post, currently under excavation by Sapienza University in Rome, with a temple to the goddess Astarte and a possible dry-dock area for repairing ships. Little remains except for foundations and walls, thought we did see a 2-story guard-house that was part of the settlement's fortifications, with the remains of a stone staircase leading up to the second story. We also visited the old cemetery, which had a special section for the interment of infants and children.
The Romans told lurid stories of Phoenicians sacrificing their babies to their god Ba'al, but a French team of forensic anthropologists investigating the bodies buried here concluded that the children had all died of natural causes--infant mortality rates were always really high before modern vaccinations and antibiotics. There may have been occasional human sacrifices--almost all ancient cultures practiced human sacrifice in times of extreme need--but it certainly wasn't the norm.
We took a very quick tour through the island's small museum, its glass cases crowded with thousands of objects found on the island, from Phoenician gravestones to Greek pottery to Roman glassware, before heading back to our bus via the ferry.
By now, it was late afternoon, and we were all sunburned, sweaty, and tired, but we had one more stop to make before going to our new hotel. Not too far from Marsala and Motya, there's a museum that houses the reconstructed remnants of a Phoenician ship recovered from where it sank just off the coast. The museum also houses a small but impressive collection of Greek and Roman finds--sadly, they prohibited photography inside (I managed to take a couple of photos before discovering this rule, and all the folks with iPhones, including Professor Bob, continued to snap away once the museum staffer vanished for her coffee break).
Our new hotel is quite nice, located in Mazara, a cute little seaside town. Unfortunately, we're only staying here for one night. Tomorrow, we head for Selinunte, which is supposed to have some really impressive ancient Greek temples.