Inside the huts of this Bronze Age village the largest jars served one purpose only: collecting water. On a volcanic island with no rivers that is the question that decides everything, and the people who lived here solved it with huge hand-modelled terracotta jars, kept indoors.
What to see
The excavations have brought to light twenty-five huts, circular and oval, three or four metres across, with dry stone walls. The village is built in levels, because the slope is steep and there was no flat ground: it climbs from a few dozen metres above the sea up to three hundred, between Santa Marina and capo Faro.
Inside the huts furnishings and everyday objects were found, with stone slabs and shelves on which the vases were set. It has been calculated that the village housed a couple of hundred people. It belongs to the Milazzese culture, the Middle Bronze Age facies named after a headland on Panarea, a little further off in the same archipelago.
Visiting
The site is above Santa Marina Salina, in the Aeolian islands; it was identified in the nineteen-fifties and dug in several campaigns between the late nineties and the early two thousands. You reach it on foot, and the finds are in the civic museum at Lingua. An hour.
Our editors' tip
Stand inside the perimeter of one hut and stay there a minute. It is three or four metres across: the space of a small room, for a whole family, with the stone shelves still in place along the wall. No museum reconstruction gives you the measure that standing in the middle of a circle of stones does.