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Piazza Armerina and Morgantina
A small room is entirely devoted to the moment when Ulysses offers Wine to the Cyclops Polyphemus, while close by is the famous Erotic Scene, a fairly innocent embrace between a half-naked young lady and her boy-friend. The colossal, expensive enterprise of creating these floors in what must have been a relatively short time (5-10 years) involved bringing hundreds of skilled craftsmen from various North African ateliers (although contemporary, the floors are very different stylistically), and providing enormous quantities of material for them to work with the rich chromatic effects were obtained by using cubes of coloured stone, together with pieces of terracotta and glass. Some of the yellow and green marble, from quarries which were already exhausted at that time, must have been recuperated from preceding buildings elsewhere. Morgantina, a short distance (14km) from Piazza Armerina, is near the little farming community of Aidone. It is the site of a city inhabited by both Greeks and Sicels, which reached its moment of greatest splendour in the 3rd century bc. It was sacked and totally destroyed by Marcus Marcellus' mercenaries, Mamertine soldiers from Spain, as a reward for helping him take the recalcitrant city of Syracuse in 212 bc. The hauntingly beautiful site, dominated by Mount Etna to the north, offers the interesting possibility of exploring the ruined town street by street, with its unusual stepped agora, fine town-houses, temples, industrial areas and the theatre. To top of page |
From Enna a country road leads
by Lake Pergusa and through dense woods
to the old hill-town of Piazza Armerina, with its well-defined medieval
districts and stone-paved streets, scented with freshly-baked bread, and
resonant with the sounds of the Lombard dialect still spoken by the people.
In the valley 6km away is the extraordinary Villa Romana del Casale, worth
the journey to Sicily for its 3,500sq m of splendid 4th-century ad Roman
mosaic floors, the most extensive in the world, and protected for posterity
by a providential mud-slide in the early Middle Ages. Perhaps the hunting
lodge of an emperor, or the retreat of a wealthy merchant dealing in the
animal trade, the villa, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, comprises
c. 50 rooms. Some of the scenes portrayed on the floors are dedicated to
the hunt, and the capture abroad and transport to Rome of wild animals destined
for the circus. Particularly notable among these are the richly-detailed
Room of the Small Hunt, and the long corridor known as the Great Hunt. Well
known is the Triclinium, the three-lobed banqueting hall with its masterful
portrayals of the Labours of Hercules, or the Room of the Girls in Bikinis.