Halfway up the outer wall runs a band of limestone blocks carrying a Kufic inscription, now so worn that no one can read it: from those letters scholars worked out who paid for the work, Roger II, and a date around 1140-1141. The rest of the building is a plain stone cube with no ornament, set at the foot of Monte Chiarastella beside the rocky spur where the hot water came out. It is the only Islamic bath complex left standing in Sicily: a hammam raised between the second half of the 10th century and the early 11th, then reworked under the Normans.
What to see
Inside there is a single room, covered by a slightly pointed vault and split into two unequal parts by a triple pointed arch resting on two columns with Corinthian capitals. Three windows open above the arches. In the larger half, three basins are sunk into the floor side by side, separated by low dividing walls; the smaller half has just one. You can still follow the lines that filled and emptied the pools, fed by hot and cold springs that rise a few steps away.
Roman blocks are built into the wall, a sign that a bathing plant already stood here in antiquity. The chronology is still argued over: the Arab geographer al-Idrisi does not list these baths in the Book of Roger, and some scholars read the building as late Norman work. In the early 14th century the site took in a fondaco; in the mid-18th century Baron Niccolò Diana cut the pool south of the wall and divided the single large northern basin into three. The last remodelling dates from the 19th century.
Visiting
The baths lie about two kilometres north-northeast of the village along the provincial road: you drive there, park on the verge and walk the last few metres. The Sicilian Region expropriated the building in 1975 and since 1984 the Palermo heritage office has handled its restoration and opening; the monument now comes under the archaeological park of Himera, Solunto and Iato, which sets tickets and hours: both shift with the season, so it is worth phoning ahead. Twenty minutes cover everything: there is only one room.
Our editors' tip
Go in the morning, when light comes through the three high windows and falls straight onto the basins: that is the only moment when you understand how the hall was lit. Then stretch the stop, because since 1997 the springs and the baths have belonged to the Cefalà Diana and Chiarastella nature reserve, and the ruins of the castle stand on the crag above the village, half an hour uphill with the whole valley below.