Sicily - part four

As the climate changes, Sicily’s torrid summers are even more torrid (with consequent wildfires) and this autumn seemed warmer - often very warm - than past visits. Still, shoulder season with hat and water allowed for unjostled time to quietly appreciate treasures I’d not previously seen. 

Segesta is a marvel. 

Tucked in a remote valley not far from the Tyrrhenian Sea, just one temple (420 BCE), but never finished, so no marbles to transfer to the British Museum. And definitely not as busy as the Parthenon. One person stands below a massive column. 

Segesta’s 3rd Century BCE theatre has a backdrop, which, to this day, competes with plays for audience appreciation.

On the other side of Sicily is the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento. A World Heritage site, much different than the last heritage site I visited, isolated and foggy, Newfoundland’s Viking L’Anse aux Meadows.

https://trainsandboatsandplanesandtheoddbus.blogspot.com/2023/06/newfoundland-and-labrador-part-three.html

On a hill above the Mediterranean, seven temples were built during the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. These are among the largest and best-preserved ancient Greek buildings outside Greece.

The Temple of Concordia was later turned into a basilica but saved when Christian elements were removed in the 1780s.

At the Temple of Heracles ... 

... from an English class sixty or so years ago, the last lines of ‘Ozymandias’ come to mind:

‘"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away’.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

Siracusa or Syracuse has the 5th Century BCE Teatro Greco. Of all the theatres and amphitheatres I’ve seen on Sicily, this may be most inspiring. 

According to my 1966 guide, ‘It’s probable Aeschylus saw his plays The Persians and The Women of Aetna given in this magnificent setting, where the Syracusans would also have seen works by Sophocles, Euripides and other famous Greek playwrights’. 

Aeschylus’s The Women of Aetna (Etna)(or possibly the Nymphs of Mount Etna) is a lost tragedy written in Sicily around 476 BC. The play celebrated the founding of the city of Aetna after a volcanic eruption.

And what’s classical history without Homer? In Aci Trezza, the Cyclops Polyphemus, who lived on Mount Etna and was blinded by Odysseus … 

… is found not far from the boulders he threw as the wily hero escaped.

Sorry, this is false news from millennia ago. The boulders are lava (basalt), prosaically described in my guide to Etna as ‘intrusions of magma’. 

Myth or not, I prefer the Polyphemus in Palermo’s wonderful puppet museum.