Ruined in Selinunte

Sunday, 22 October 2017 

Another beautiful blue-sky day and we were off to another ruin at Selinute. The archaeological site contains five temples centred on an acropolis. Of the five temples, only the Temple of Hera has been re-erected. At its peak before 409BCE the city may have contained up to 30,000 people, excluding slaves.

These columns have not been re-erected. Getting so close you get a better sense of their scale.

The Dancing Satyr of Mazara del Vallo (circa 3-2nd century BCE) was our next stop. (In case you don't know, a satyr was a Greek/Roman woodland god, attendant of Bacchus the god of wine).  Though the Dancing Satyr is missing both arms and one leg, its head and torso are remarkably well-preserved despite millennia spent at the bottom of the sea.  The torso was recovered from the sandy sea floor at a depth of 500 m off the south western coast of Sicily in 1998, in the nets of a fishing boat.