Solunto

An ancient Phoenician city amid the lemon groves east of Palermo

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The Solunto headland is covered in lemon groves, and I think I'll start with the lemons.

Though lemons are an important part of Sicilian cuisine and identity—the ancestor of gelato was made by pouring sugared lemon juice over snow from Mt. Etna—they are not native to the island. They were introduced by Sicily's Arab conquerors in the 9th century, along with other citrus trees, melons, sugar cane, dates, and sophisticated mining operations, salt plantations, and the mystical secrets of internal plumbing. (I'd swear I've stayed in Sicilian hotels where the original Saracen plumbing system is still in place).

The Arabs took the island from the Byzantines, the Byzantines from the Vandals in the 6th century, the Vandals from the Romans in the 5th century, and the Romans from the Greeks in the 3rd century BC. (See? It's always been a popular place.)

At that time, Sicily was part—the most successful and powerful part, actually—of Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece. Heck, the Sicilian city-state of Siracusa had even trounced the Athenian armada back in 413 BC. The Greeks had started settling the east coast of Sicily in the 7th century BC, around the same time as the Phoenicians.

The Forgotten Rulers of Sicily

So much is made of all those other cultures that at one time or another ruled Sicily (Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and later Normans, French Angevins, Spanish Bourbons, Napoleon, and—only since 1860—Italians) that most people forget its greatest city and capital was founded by a colony of Middle Eastern culture based in North Africa.

The Phoenicians—of alphabet fame (though it's evolved to the point where there's no way for us to make heads of tails of the original, our alphabet is a direct descendent of theirs)—were building cities across what is today the Palestine/Syrian coast back in the Bronze Age five millennia ago. (One remains to this day an important capital: Beirut.)

By the 7th century, they were conquering ports across the Mediterranean: in Corsica, Greece, Egypt, and especially Tunisia, where the Phoenician of Carthage eventually eclipsed even the motherland and began its own wide-spread colonization, spreading Phoenician culture to the shores of Morocco, Spain, Italy, and, of course, Sicily.

The Phoenician metropolis of the west coast, the island city of Moytia, was destroyed by Siracusa, as part of an escalating conflict with the Carthaginian leader Hannibal, at the turn of the 4th century BC (its survivors moved to the mainland to found Lilybaeum, which we now call Marsala; the city ruins on the island have since been excavated as a kind of modest Phoenician Pompeii).

Along the north coast, the Phoenicians built two mighty port cities. One, Panormus, lies buried under the strata of later versions of the city we now call Palermo (old downtown Panormus was around Piazza Indipendenza, with the later, Hellenized Neapolis of the city extending down Via Vittorio Emanuele II as far as the Quattro Canti).

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The fishing villages

Below Solunto on the coast you can see two small towns.

Porticello is a compact fishing town, its pair of piers reaching out into the sea like crab pinchers and barnacled with the second largest fishing fleet in Sicily (after Mazara del Vallo). The ground floors of the houses lining the wide, piazza-like road along Porticello's port are pigeonholed with half a dozen little seafood restaurants and pizzerie. It's a relaxing setting in which to have dinner, with outdoor tables and views over the small fleet of fishing vessels bobbing in the harbor, but a small word of warning: just imagine for a moment how Sicily's second largest fishing port must smell. You get used to it quickly enough, but still.

Next-door is the even sleepier fishing village of S. Elia, built around a narrow inlet between two spears of rock jutting a few hundred feet into the sea. Its wooden boats—painted sparkling white with sky-blue trim—are pulled ashore on a little beach in a cove around the side of the eastern rock promontory. I strolled down there one afternoon from the ruins, and found a few Italians still out on the rocks, trying to catch the last rays of the sun on their already leathery skin. A clutch of men sat at a rickety table in the pedestrians-only street playing scopa. One of them kept dropping the cards on the ground when it was his turn to deal.

I mosied over to one of the handful of beachside bars to claim a plastic table and chair, read a bit of my book, and enjoy a sea breeze and a welcome-back-to-Italy Campari and soda.

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This material was last updated January 2010. All information was accurate at the time.

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