Caltagirone via Morgantina (22/9)

We left the eyrie of Enna and headed south to Morgantina, an ancient city founded around 1000 BC by people from Latium in Italy. It was then occupied by Greek colonists and fought with, and was fought over, by all the usual protagonists over the period of about 450 to 200 BC, when the Romans finally defeated it and virtually destroyed it. What was left of the once thriving trading centre was handed over by the Romans to Spanish mercenaries who stayed until the first century BC. The last act of defiance in its turbulent history was a rebellion by slaves. It then sank into oblivion and wasn't mentioned again in Roman literature. It wasn't rediscovered until the 1950's, when extensive archeological excavations were started. 

Portion of the agora at Morgantina.  The streets stretched both up
and down the ridge on either side.

 The city covered an area of approximately 78 hectares and was bounded by 7 kilometres of walls. The centre of the city is in a valley between two hills on a ridge and is essentially divided into two by this arrangement. The city is laid out on a rectangular grid, and there were fifteen roads leading away from the city centre to the east and the west.

The theatre at Morgantina

It had a theatre which could seat about one thousand people. This was carved out of the hillside and was almost part of the agora, or town square. The agora was unusual in that it was on two levels, with a set of fourteen steps dividing it into an upper and a lower level. These doubled up as seating for people attending public meetings which was part of the function of this space. There was a colonnade of shops on three sides, with those on one side never having been completed. A smaller, older market took up most of one corner of the upper level of the agora, and a sanctuary to Demeter and Persephone filled much of the lower level. 
The ruins of some of the shops are up to the second storey, and some of the houses which looked down on the agora from the eastern side had walls still standing which were almost two metres high. Several of these houses had mosaic floors which were very simple, and fore-runners of what came later. The alters in the sanctuary are still in place, one which you made offerings on, and the other which you threw votive offerings into. At one end of the agora was a gymnasium for the population to use. There was a small bath house associated with this. 

The steps which divide the agora
and were obviously used for meetings

Away from the actual agora there doesn't seem to have been much excavation done, unless a lot of what they found has been buried again to preserve it. On the western hill there were more houses with mosaic floors, but more refined than those in the east. Quite some distance west of the agora was an excavation underway on a much larger bath house complex. It was thought that there would have been another one to the east to service the population over on that hill. We spent some time here exploring the ruins, but once again, the information provided was in a bad state of repair. A number of the boards were missing, and many were unreadable, having literally baked brown in the sun. The site of Morgantina doesn't have the cudos that the nearby villa that we saw yesterday has, although the two sites are less than ten kilometres apart. There were very few people strolling about and we suspect this is why the information boards are so awful. Very few visitors to justify the expense.
From here we drove to Aidone to visit the museum there, as a host of the finds on display came from Morgantina. We stopped at a café opposite for a gelati first as we were thirsty, but the owners were preparing for a group of tourists and we didn't get our order until they had been fixed up. When we did get our order, the owners were most apologetic.

The baths at Morgantina are still being excavated

The display was excellent, covering all eras from Neolithic prehistory to the time of its demise. There were a couple of interesting items on display, as much for what they were as for their recent history. One was a hoard of beautiful silver tableware which had been stolen from the site and sold to collectors and institutions in the US. It was an American archeologist who had been working on the site who recognised them in the Metropolitan Museum New York and worked to have them repatriated. The other was a larger than life marble statue, the " Venus of Morgantina", which was also stolen and sold to the J. Paul Getty Foundation Museum. The tragedy was that it was actually sawn into three pieces so it was easier to smuggle out, and it was a twenty year haggle before it was returned. That is all we know of the story, so it all sounds very intriguing. The museum paid 40 billion old lire for it (€20 million) but either didn't check or wasn't interested in the provenance of what they were buying. Hoped they learnt from the experience.

We have learnt a little about how sculptors created their works. In the case of the Venus, the head, arms and hands were sculpted from marble, and the drapery from limestone. This may be a cost cutting exercise, or it may be to save the marble for more aesthetic works, because the limestone was painted anyway. Why waste superior marble under a coat of paint? The artefacts in the museum were very well displayed, and some of the interpretive material was in English, which we appreciated.

Some of the silver goods originally
stolen from Morgantina

We went back to café after our visit to the museum and had a chat with the owner who advised us on what we should have. He made a special sweet and a thirst-quencher for us and we left on better terms than we had when we were delayed by the tour group.

We arrived in Caltagirone in good time so decided we would inspect a few B&Bs in the old part of town before committing ourselves. This was easier said then done, and for the first time let our sat
nav lead us up a dead end, so to speak. The road became so narrow we had to back down the one way street we had been led up because it became too narrow. Fortunately it was only a few car lengths, and we had a piazza to back onto, but we scraped the car in the process. We suddenly felt vindicated for taking out total insurance ie. we drive in to the car rental return park, get out and walk away, and not have to haggle over every little scratch that might have appeared between Palermo and Catania. 

We decided to retreat with our tails between our legs, and looked for a place that we were sure we would be able to get to and ended up on a farm-stay just out of the newer end of town. The room was comfortable, even though the hotel was right on the road. Double glazing is wonderful how it blocks out noise. Although it was still reasonably early, we decided to stay put for the evening. There was a restaurant attached to the hotel, so we didn't have to go looking for one. It was a very pleasant evening, so we found a table in the outdoor eating area and spent an hour or so catching up with ourselves. When it came to dinner we ate indoors because it looked like the outdoor area was being set up for a large party of diners. We asked the waiter for advice on menu choice and he advised on an antipasto, and then pasta, all cooked by his mother using their own produce. It was sensational. The antipasto must have had eight different selections of goodies, and the pasta was fresh and home-made. The pitcher of wine, also from the farm, was excellent and cost €4. There were several other people in the restaurant who must have been informed that we were Australian, because they were eager to tell us about their friends who either visited to lived in Oz. We have thought about this, and all our Italian friends actually come from Sicily.