Museo Archeologico di Naxos

The Archaeological Museum of Naxos gathers more than fifty years of excavation finds from Sicily's first Greek colony inside a small fort on Capo Schisò. Its galleries of painted antefixes, votive terracottas and ancient ship anchors give the ruins outside their full meaning.

Why it matters

Every object in this museum came from the ground — or the water — within a short walk of its walls. The site of ancient Naxos was never built over by a modern town, so the finds from more than five decades of campaigns form an unusually coherent picture of a single Greek colony, from its Neolithic prehistory on Capo Schisò through its foundation around 734 BC to its destruction in 403 BC. The museum opened in 1979 as the culmination of long research directed by the archaeologist Paola Pelagatti, and it remains the only place where the colony's material culture can be read in sequence: the earliest imported Greek pottery, the city's own painted architecture, grave groups from its necropoleis, and the stone and lead anchors raised from the bay where its ships once lay. The museum's collections complement the walls and streets of the archaeological area outside.

What to notice

The entrance rooms present prehistoric finds, including a Stentinello-style cup that testifies to a Neolithic settlement on the promontory, and two large pithoi from Early Bronze Age tombs. The early colonial galleries follow with Corinthian imports — including fragments of cups of the Thapsos type dated 740–700 BC — alongside Euboean wares and the first local imitations, the physical evidence of the encounter between Greek settlers and Sicel communities. On the upper floor, one room gathers material from the sacred areas, among them votive protomes from the south-west sanctuary and a pediment slab with a Gorgon of about 580 BC; the other covers the archaic and classical city and the necropoleis of the fifth to third centuries BC, including the tomb known as the Surgeon's Tomb with its rare glass cup, probably Alexandrian, of the early third century BC. The museum's signature pieces are the architectural revetment slabs and antefixes with silen masks produced at Naxos from the late sixth century BC, linked to the cult of Dionysus that also appears on the city's first coinage; it also includes the Arula of Heidelberg-Naxos of 530 BC with its facing sphinxes, reassembled only in 1997 from a fragment in Heidelberg and one bought at Giardini in 1973. The maritime collection includes stone anchors and lead anchor stocks dredged from the bays of Naxos and Taormina in the 1960s, preserving the colony's maritime history.

Context and history

The museum building is part of the site's history. The museum occupies a small Bourbon-era fort near the tourist port at the edge of the archaeological area, and that fort incorporates an older watchtower, built in the late sixteenth century to guard the entrance to the roadstead. A stretch of the ancient city wall crosses the museum garden, so the transition from galleries to ruins happens in a few steps. The institution was inaugurated in 1979 to crown the long excavation campaigns led by Pelagatti, whose team also reassembled the Heidelberg-Naxos altar from fragments separated since antiquity. A small nucleus of material has a different history: objects bought or donated by the pioneering archaeologist Paolo Orsi, including grave goods from three tombs excavated in 1919 at Cocolonazzo di Mola near Taormina, dated to the second half of the eighth century BC and cited as among the clearest evidence of contact between the first colonists and the Sicels. The museum forms part of the Parco archeologico di Naxos e Taormina.