“The region’s richly textured history and culture unravelled among classical sites, fishing harbours and nature reserves”
So, who on earth were the Elymians? Every visitor to the fabled ruins of Segesta probably asks themselves this question at some point. For me it was at first sight of a massive temple from the saddle of my bike as I pedalled across the Sicilian hinterland. Rows of Doric columns, glowing amber in afternoon sunlight, exerted an almost unnervingly powerful presence. The grandeur was enhanced by a solitary setting surrounded by fields freckled with grain, and thickets of spiky agave.
Classical Greek, you’d think. Not so. Archaeologists reckon this temple was built in the fifth century BC by these mysterious Elymians who first settled Sicily’s far west in the bronze age. Their script has still not been deciphered, nor do we know what gods they worshipped, although it’s pretty obvious from whom they borrowed the Doric architectural style.
Were they survivors from the Fall of Troy, as legend has it, whose adventures Virgil recounted in The Aeneid? I’ll buy that, I told myself. The builders of this astonishing temple had to be heroes – mythological or otherwise.
From the temple I scrambled a rocky path up Mount Barbaro to an empty amphitheatre gouged out of the summit. Second century BC, this one, by which time Segesta was part of the Roman Empire. I gazed over an endless swathe of Sicily’s wild west: from the fortified harbour of Castellammare del Golfo where I had started my cycling tour that morning, to the untamed mountains of the interior and
