Los Angeles Times features Western Sicily

A cracked concrete road spirals up to a lookout over Salemi in western Sicily, passing flimsy-looking apartment houses, weed-choked fields, rubble-strewn construction sites and a dilapidated villa with a sign that says it’s an insane asylum.

All along the way are views over the old hill town, with its echoing alleyways and stairs, ruined Baroque churches and roofless palazzos abandoned after the 1968 Belice Valley earthquake, a 6.0-magnitude shaker that killed 300 people and left 70,000 people homeless.

The historic center had been inhabited since Roman times, but the destruction was so massive that many people simply cut their losses and moved away, building an unlovely sprawl of new neighborhoods around the old town. Beyond are the sun-blasted fields and bare hills of western Sicily that bankrupted land owners, turned peasant farmers into slaves and inspired mass emigration.

It is a dolorous landscape, “never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as a country made for rational beings to live in should be,” Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in “The Leopard,” his classic 1958 novel about Sicily.

Standing here in the fall, I scanned the horizon for the fabled Doric temple at Segesta, Marsala’s windmills and the Aphrodite shrine at Erice.

But for the moment all the treasures that had brought me to this singular corner of Europe — across the narrow strait of Messina from mainland Italy and just 100 miles from the north coast of Africa — were concealed, like the images I sought in Hidden Pictures puzzles as a child.

To get here, I flew from Rome to Palermo’s Falcone-Borsellino International Airport, rented a car and headed along the island’s wild western coast, an Italian version of Baja outside the window. Near Trapani, I turned and drove about 30 miles east to Segesta and its Elymian temple, first and foremost among western Sicily’s treasures. It stands out from the highway, with no tourist squalor to distract from its solitary splendor.

But who were the Elymians? Everyone who visits Segesta must ask this question.

Greek sources and some archaeological evidence suggest they arrived on the west coast of Sicily from Asia Minor around 1300 BC, which tends to support legends identifying the first Elymians as the band of refugees from the Fall of Troy whose adventures were told in Virgil’s “Aeneid.” I believe the legend because the people who built the extraordinary temple at Segesta had to be heroes.

Source: Los Angeles Times