Selinunte

When Amy travels with her school groups to Rome, she makes a point of using local transportation rather than hiring a motor coach. In addition to being much cheaper it has the added benefit of connecting the students to the place. They see the people and get a sense for how it all fits together. For this trip with the school, all of our transportation on Sicily was accomplished by private motor coach. We departed base-camp Agrigento on the morning of Saturday, 18 febbraio, headed for base-camp Palermo. Our route took us first to the archeological site at Selinunte. Unlike many of the other sites we visited which were in or at the outskirts of cities and towns, Selinunte is in the middle of nowhere. Since I was lulled to inattention by sitting on the bus, I can’t even tell you what it is near.

The city of Selinunte was founded sometime early in the 600’s BC. It was relatively important in the grand scheme of things. However, it didn’t fare well in a couple of major conflicts and was completely destroyed in the mid 200’s BC. Apparently, it was never rebuilt. When you arrive at the site you are greeted by a group of temples. Unlike the temples in Agrigento, no conventionally accepted attributions exist, so they are referred to alphabetically. One temple, referred to as Temple E, was partially rebuilt in the 1900’s. Contrary to what you might imagine, rather than trying to reconstruct it as originally as possible, the restorers took pains to clearly demark what was original and what was newly added. For example, rather than creating new stone pieces to span between some of the columns they used concrete beams instead, interspersing them with the originals. There is a small piece of inscription believed to be from Temple E which mentions Hera, so it is sometimes referred to at the Temple of Hera.

Off on another peninsula is a second temple which is in relatively good shape. You can’t walk there from where we were. It is called Temple C and it can be seen in the distance in this picture.

Most of the temples are little more than HUGE piles of rubble. The students spent quite a bit of time just climbing around the rocks. To give you a sense of scale, this picture is the remains of the pieces of a column. Columns were not constructed of a single piece of material, but were made from a series of cylinders or drums.

Each of the drum in the picture below is almost 8 feet in diameter!

Finally, we have a very happy Amy, at home in the ruins.