Petersontravels

We departed Marsala and I had to drive in that god forsaken “narrow street” and “blind intersection” city for the last time!  Whew!  We made our way about an hour southeast and visited the “Selinunte Archeological Park”, the largest site of Greek ruins in Sicily.

Selinunte was a rich and extensive Greek city in Sicily and is the site of great ancient temples with the earliest dating from 550 BC.  The first section you explore on entry is called The East Hill that holds three temples of varying sizes.

First up is the dramatic Temple E, which dates from 460-450 BC.

There are a couple of interesting modern artworks on the path to Temple E.  First up is this ostrich burying it’s head in the sand, an allegory of about 70% of the voters in California.

Love this very realistic looking baby elephant being hoisted by a little boy.

Temple E was partially reconstructed by the original materials found on the site between 1956 and 1959.  This action was not without some controversy.

An original frieze at the top of the walls consisted of metopes (a rectangular architectural element) depicting people.  Those were all moved to the Archeological Museum in Palermo (why can’t they be the museum they have here on site?)

The temples here at Selinunte are unique in that you can pretty much walk anywhere you want amongst the ruins, including inside the temples.

Directly adjacent to Temple E is Temple F,  the oldest and smallest of the three on The East Hill, built between 550 and 540 BC.  It is also the most dilapidated of the three.  I didn’t even take a photo of it, so here is one from the internet.

Temple G was the largest here and among the largest in the Greek World.  This building was under construction for a long period of time, from 530 to 409 BC.  This is evidenced by the variation in style of the temple.  It was also incomplete, as seen by the absence of fluting on some of the columns and by the existence of column drums (the individual parts that made up a column) of the same dimensions still in the quarry 10km away.  Very little remains standing today, and to get this photo you had to climb into the jumble of rocks, risking an ankle injury.  The things I do for the blog!

We briefly visited the museum, but you can only view so many pottery bits before getting bleary eyed and wanting to get back outside.  They did have some cool videos to watch though, showing how Temple E is used today for all sorts of concerts and performances, as well as a very cool light show should you be here at night.  The museum also has this display of Temple Y, parts of which were found reused in other temple projects.  The three columns are original, while the two metopes (upper left) are copies of the originals, which are of course in Palermo.

Here is one of the original metopes in Palermo.

Ok, once back outside we hopped on a shuttle (take the shuttle, trust me) and were taken to The Acropolis, which sits right on the water.  This was the site of a large settlement, with as many as 30,000 residents at it’s height in 409 BC.  The site has several temples, the most impressive one being the Doric Temple C (in the background) dating from 550 BC.

Temple C probably functioned as an archive, since hundreds of seals (used with wax) were discovered here.  It was partially reconstructed using original materials in 1929.

I took a photo from this spot and then there was suddenly a line of people swapping phones to take photos of each other.

We walked amongst the ruins of the temple and noted how haphazardly some of the stones were laying on each other.

Some even making little pathways through the rocks.

This is the view looking back towards Temple E from The Acropolis area, giving you a feeling for how large the park is.

One last look at Temple E as we were heading to our final shuttle to the parking lot.  We highly recommend this visit, and both thought it was more rewarding than Segesta, so if you have to pick one, pick Selinunte.

Coming up, we arrive in Agrigento, and stay a mere 100 yards from the incredible Valley of the Temples (more ancient Greece stuff!).

 

 

 

 

The second winery we visited in Marsala, Donnafugata, turned out to be a rather large producer, who makes a huge amount of wine from multiple locations in Sicily.

The tour is somewhat commercialized, with plenty of graphics to assist with the telling of their story. This graphic shows where in Sicily their grapes are sourced from, including that island off Tunisia, Pantelleria.

The island of Pantelleria is known for severe weather, including very high winds, so they grow bush vines versus trellised vines. They also dig a hole around the base of the vines as an overall protection against the high winds. I found this very interesting, to the point I’d love to visit this island at some point.

They have a massive barrel room filled with brand new French oak barrels that are mostly being used for their Chardonnay and their red blend, Mille Notte. I’ve never seen that many new barrels in one spot, and this photo only captured about half the room!

In amongst this oak forest of barrels is where we officially met Edgar and Bianca, our new friends from Austria. Edgar and I have been emailing each other pretty much every day since we met here! They come to Sicily every year while their son is on break…one of the joys of living smack dab in the middle of Europe! Hoping we can connect with them on our Germany trip in March/April of next year.

Donnafugata seems to spend a lot of money of labels. Every label is a work of art! In the US, the label pretty much makes the sale for 90% of wine consumers, so this makes sense.

We had a light lunch with our wine pairing, but I gotta say all of the food was cold and appeared to have been sitting there for awhile. Not ideal when you are trying to pair wines with the food! Below is the wine lineup from the tasting.

For me, the best wine in the tasting was the red wine using some of that new oak, Mille Notte, a blend of Nero d’Avola, Petit Verdot and Syrah. It has a very Napa Valley feel to it! I think even my friend Mark Johnson would like it, and he hates everything from Europe!

After the tasting we made our way back to the hotel, only having to back out of a street we entered the wrong way once (I blame Google Maps). Later that evening I braved the narrow streets of Marsala once again for a tour of the local salt flat company, Saline Genna. This is the view of the main Egadi Island across the flats. The little piles of salt in the photo are for show…the salt season is over at this point.

This is where you meet your tour guide. I had booked this 5:00 tour about a month out, and they meant to end the tours at 4:00, but insisted on honoring our ticket time, so we were the only ones on the tour.

The salt flats here started in the 15th century while the area was under Spanish rule. At one point there were windmills here that moved the briney water from one tank to another, but those have long since vanished. Everything in done by pump now.

Here is Kim relaxing as we wait to start our tour.

Our tour guide advised us these large piles of salt represent each rectangular portion of salt flat on the site, which is rather impressive. The salt season harvest starts in early August and runs until early October.

We got a shot us while out on the flats. It was windy and cold!

Our tour coincided with the sunset at 5:15. This is how much planning I do! Gorgeous sunset.

Another view of Egadi Island with the salt flat worker rest house in the foreground. What a great spot for photos!

The salt flats start a ways from where our tour was. They move the salt water from one spot to another to keep increasing the salinity via evaporation, until salt crystals finally form. The bottom of the flats have hard rock so they can then rake the salt up into piles to allow them to evaporate even further. As I said previously, we are out of the salt season, so this photo is from their website.

The sunset as seen from the edge of a huge salt pile on the shore.

One last sunset photo looking across the flats. What a gorgeous spot!

That night at dinner I was surprised to see we had a name tag at our table! That’s service! Unfortunately the food wasn’t as good as the service.

Coming up, we depart Marsala and make our way towards Agrigento, with a stop at the Selinunte Archeological Park to explore Sicily’s largest collection of Greek ruins.