This afternoon we set off in the bus for Morgantina, another archeological site not far from Piazza Armerina. The bus made its way down the winding narrow roads along the hillsides, looking out on a very peculiar and quite spectacular landscape.
Slightly to the left of where my photograph starts, we could just see a shadowy outline of Mt Etna, but it didn't really come out in photographs.
The original settlement of Morgantina was a citadel established on a hill top in the 10th or 11th century BC. This is the view from the current settlement, which was the one we visited.
It was a really hot afternoon, and we had to walk almost a kilometer from the bus to reach the settlement. The hills are very steep!
The settlement came under the influence of Syracuse in the 5th century BC, but backed the wrong side in the Punic wars, and was sacked by the Romans, after which it started to decline. We looked at several different buildings, including part of a sacred site. This is one of the altars of Demeter, with a hole leading down to the underworld, so that blood from the sacrifice might reach down there.
We climbed a nearby hill to see some of the houses there, several of which had mosaics. Unfortunately, the two best were behind glass and could not be photographed because the sun was so strong and the shadows so deep that you couldn't really see them at all, let alone take a photo.
Apart from the mosaics, you knew the houses were expensive because of the view they had across the valley down to the town. This next photo shows the Theatre, which is reasonably well preserved.
Apparently it would seat around 2500 people, some of them on wooden stands above the stone seats.
We descended the hill down towards the theatre again, then made the long 1 kilometer climb back up the hill to the bus. Everybody had to go and buy water as soon as we got back to the ticket office, it was so hot in the sun and there was very little shade.
The bus drove us back to the town of Aidone, where we climbed steep hills to visit the small museum, housed in an ex-monastery.
One of the great treasures of the museum is this statue, referred to as Venus.
She is from the Classical Greek period, and is imagined to be rising from the waves, which is why her dress looks quite clingy! The statue was originally robbed from the site, and came into the posession of an American University, who agreed to return it to where it came from. I have the feeling I wasn't supposed to take photographs in this museum, but nobody noticed me take this one - I didn't use a flash
I couldn't resist this bath from the third century BC
It looks not at all unlike many baths I have photographed before - I seem to have taken pictures of baths all over the world, though never one this old.
Another thing which was robbed from the site was a wonderful collection of silver from the 4th century BC, which was also returned quite recently. I liked the piece below best, but there were many superb objects.
After we had seen all the ceramics in the museum, we did more climbing and descending of very steep hills to get back to the bus. Aidone has extremely steep and very narrow streets, totally unsuited to buses - in fact, they aren't well suited to cars either.
The bus took us back to the hotel where we just had time for showers before an extremely interesting talk on Italy, Fascism and the Second World War. Then we walked through the town to a restaurant for dinner.
No comments:
Post a Comment