Solunto

An ancient Phoenician city amid the lemon groves east of Palermo

The Solunto headland at the suburban town of Santa Flavia is covered in lemon groves, so 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.

Lemons 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.

Solunto

The Phoenicians built two major settlements on the northwestern shores of Sicily: Panormus (which grew into Palermo), and Solus, which the Italian styles Solunto.

After those rampaging Greeks from Siracusa destroyed the original, coastal Phoenician settlment called Kfr (from Kafara, which just meant "village"), the survivors rebuilt in a more defensible site just above the shores on Monte Catalfano, which became a booming little commercial and artistic city known as Solus. (The name derives either from the Pheonician word for "rock" or from the name of a bandit defeated by Hercules.

The Greco-Phoenician Solus became the Roman colony of Soluntum in 254 BC, slowly growing into a proper city by the Imperial Age—and it is the remains of this Roman-era city that you see today.

The typical grid-like street plan stair-stepping down the hillside—the site is so steep, the side streets are in many places actually staircases—dates to the AD 3rd century.

Among the remains of paved streets, re-erected columns, and outlines of houses and other buildings are the old Ginnasio (not actually a gym, but a peristyle that was mis-identified long ago but the name stuck), some scraps of mosaics, and a theater that could seat 1,200.

In 2003, a small antiquarium opened at Solunto to give more context to site visitors and to display some of the ancient objects turned up by archaologists (though, frankly, the best of those are in the Palermo archeological museum), including underwater finds.

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 pedestrian s-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.

Tips & links

Share this page

Search ReidsItaly.com