Parco Archeologico di Segesta

Segesta's archaeological park keeps the whole of an ancient city in one Sicilian landscape: an unfinished Doric temple in the valley, a Hellenistic theatre on Monte Barbaro, defensive walls, a mosque and a Norman castle stacked through twenty centuries of layered history.

Why it matters

The Parco Archeologico di Segesta preserves an ancient city across two acropolis summits, with walls, a sanctuary, a necropolis, a Doric temple and a Hellenistic theatre. It is managed today as one of the regional archaeological parks of Sicily under the Assessorato dei Beni Culturali e dell'Identità Siciliana, and it also administers five further sites across the territory, from the Rocca di Entella to the Grotte di Scurati.

What distinguishes Segesta from most excavated cities is the density of its layers. The official park account describes Elymian houses on the mountain slopes from the late sixth century BC, a Greek-style urban plan across two hilltops, a late-antique and Byzantine phase, a Muslim village with a mosque, and a Norman-Swabian settlement crowned by a summit castle and a church founded in 1442. These remains trace successive layers of Elymian, Greek, Byzantine, Muslim, and Norman-Swabian settlement.

What to notice

The site is built across two heights joined by a saddle. The north acropolis carries the public city: assembly buildings, the agora and the theatre, with the castle and the church above them at the summit. The south acropolis holds residential quarters, including houses identified in the park's literature as the casa delle navi.

The fortifications illustrate the city's siege engineering. The lower circuit dates to the early fifth century BC; the Porta Stazzo was defended by a bastion and three towers; and between the late fourth and mid-third century BC the Porta di Valle was turned into an artillery platform with catapults and magazines for stone projectiles. In the imperial period a higher wall with nine towers and two gates, Porta Teatro and Porta Bastione, left the old valley gate redundant, and it was reused as a mill. Outside the walls, a sixth-to-fifth-century BC sanctuary stands in contrada Mango, and a Hellenistic necropolis lies near the Porta di Valle.

Context and history

Segesta began in Elymian territory, the people to whom, as the Treccani encyclopaedia records, the city owed its origin. The Greeks mostly called it Egesta, the Romans Segesta. Its foundation myth traced the city to Aeneas, the Trojan fugitive, a claim Segesta invoked centuries later when it sided early with Rome, pointing to ancient kinship. Its recorded history is a long series of wars with neighbouring peoples, above all Selinunte. Allied with Athens and Leontini against Syracuse from 433 BC, the city backed the Athenian invasion of 415 BC, though it disappointed its allies with the modesty of its military and financial aid. Later it pursued a pro-Carthaginian policy until the advance of Dionysius I in 397 BC, and again through the age of Agathocles.

Under Rome, Segesta became the support of Roman power in western Sicily and was rewarded with libertas and immunitas; Cicero's antagonist Verres stripped the city of its famous statue of Diana. The official park account describes a great period of prosperity in the second and first centuries BC, when the city was reorganized on the model of the cities of Asia Minor, before the long late-antique to medieval sequence that ended with the church of 1442.