TOUR OF SICILY

Motye was founded on an island measuring about 1 square km. in the lagoon called Stagnone, a short distance from present-day Marsala. The coast, which was not faraway (in accordance with a typical Phoenician building procedure), could also be reached on a cart, at low tide, following a half-submerged track. Motye, in effect, was the only Phoenician town proper in Sicily, and it soon became one of their most florid colonies in the Mediterranean. Il was surrounded by high walls along which, at intervals, there uiere semicircular battlements, typical of Semitic architecture; in it there were also two gates which  today are well preserved. Its origin was said to date back lo Hercules, w/w, having found some lost herds thanks to the help of a woman called Motye, chose to give her name to the town which shortly afterwards us founded. In the Phoenician Language, the word means spinning mill, and it seems indeed that the town was  a renowned weaving centre, where cloths were also dyed purple. Apart from this, the  economic} of Motye was based on the production and trading of ceramics. It was also an important naval base and a ‘cothon’ was built there, that is to say a dry dock for repairs to ships, which, apart from the big one found at Carthage, in North Africa, is the on/y one found in the western Mediterranean.

According to what we learn from  Diodorus Siculus, Motye was embellished by elegant houses and sumptuous palaces. However, only a very small part of the dwelling area has been brought to light, and at present on/y two houses can be seen: one of them has floor mosaics and black and white paving stones, on which there are animal figures. Among the most interesting areas discovered there is the ‘tophet‘, a sacred area in which there were placed the remains of sacrifices offered to divinities, small animals and even children, the latter having been sacrificed during terrible calamities to placate the wrath of the gods. After Dionysos I destroyed it, the survivors moved to ihe coast, founding Lilybaeum (Marsala) and leaving the little island uninhabited. It remained so until Joseph Whitaker, at the end of the last century, bought it and carried out some diggings which led him to identify the islet with the ancient Phoenician base. The findings from the diggings were then gathered together and catalogued inside one of the storehouses of the villa, which was thus turned into a museum, In the course of his researches, Whitaker collected up some 10,000 objects: steles, terracotta objects with paintings on them, jewels, pottery,weapons, and so forth. The museum is now one of the most interesting of those which  illustrate the history of Phoenician civilization. Careful restoration work carried out a few years ago maintained intact the spirit and structures of the nineteenth–century museum, though introducing some modernization making it easier to visit.

They also founded other towns, like Erice, which was likewise perched on a summit  dominating the surrounding area but was to have  a completely different destiny. Erice, for centuries  the site of a much worshipped shrine, never was a mighty town and in the course of centuries was to change into a quiet village, and this is what it still is today, an unusual place, a living reliet of a past epoch, rendered ever more magic by the constant presence of little clouds conferring on the streets and houses a curious Nordic look.

By contrast, Segesta, in a few decades from its foundation, became the most important town of the Elimi and, in the fifth ceniuru B.c., was florid and powerful, with its own vast territory. Its inhabitants, not unlike the Romans, leaving aside their Middle East origins (also attested by the finding of tablets with inscriptions in a language presenting affinities with Linear B, and, like the latter, undedphered) – soon took up Hellenic customs, the most refined and admired of antiquity, making them their own.

This is the reason why, for example, the people of Segesta decided to built a magnificent temple in perfect Doric style having nothing to envy those of Akragas or Selinus – although their religion was very probably quite different from the Greek one  thus giving rise to singular architectural and religious syncretism.
Scholars define the temple of Segesta a “pseudo- temple peristyle” on the basis of incongrueniies observed with respect to the building technique of the Greeks. The latter started from the cell, the heart of the shrine, and then built the colonnade all around. At Segesta, instead, there is no trace of a cell, not even the smallest fragment.

Despite this, the temple is absolutely perfect, above all as regards the state of preservation, and it is a must for every visitor interested in archaeology.

There followed a long period of abandonment until, at the end of the first Punic War, the Romans, now masters of Sicily, refounded the town, giving it vast territories and declaring it a “civitas immunis et liberu”, to commemorate and respect a supposed common descent from Aeneas. The new city was “totally re-planned, at the end of the third century B.C., on the models of the big micro-Asiatic towns articulated with big terracing on fairly impervious heights analogous to the site where Segesta stands” (R. Camerata Scouazzo).

It is from this period that there dates the building of the theatre, which the people of Segesta decided to have in pure Hellenic style, thus giving us one of the finest ancient theatres of that epoch. For it they chose a site at the back of the agora, where already centuries before there had been a place of worship, facing the soft landscape of hills sloping down towards the sea.

In the theatre, a broad semicircle with a diameter of a little over 60 metres, there are still about twenty steps hewn out in the rock; there are just a few remains of thestage. During the summer, every two years, classical plays from all over the world are done there, once again giving life, though only for the ephemeral space of a season, to the very beautiful theatre.