Kamarina, or Camarina, was an important colony of Syracuse, founded at the mouth of the river Ippari, in the south of Sicily. Today ruins and important finds remain, above all on the Cammarana hill; according to Strabo the name means «inhabited after much toil».
What to see
It was founded in the early sixth century BC by the Syracusans on the fertile headland between the rivers Ippari and Oanis, to guard the African route and check Gela's expansion southwards. Having become an important agricultural and commercial centre, it soon came into conflict with its mother city and was defeated by the Syracusans and their allies in 552 BC. At the start of the fifth century BC Syracuse ceded it to the tyrant Hippocrates of Gela; it was then refounded and, through its alliance with Athens in the Peloponnesian War, managed to wrest Morgantina from Syracuse. Sacked and destroyed by Hannibal Mago between 405 and 401 BC, it had a new prosperity at the end of the fourth century BC, with the repopulation Timoleon carried out in 339 BC; in 258 BC it fell to the Romans. Its large port received ships of Scipio, Aemilius Paullus, Pompey, Caesar and Octavian, but in the imperial age the Romans built a new port at Kaucana and the city emptied. It was destroyed for good in 827 by the army of Asad ibn al-Furat, in the Arab conquest of Sicily.
The remains of the temple of Athena, on the acropolis, were absorbed into the church of the Madonna di Cammarana, filled with ex-votos of sailors who had escaped storms and destroyed by fire in 1834; its stones were used to build the farmstead that now houses the Museum. There remain archaic tombs of the seventh century BC, insignificant ruins of a temple of Minerva, the line of the canal-port along the Ippari and, in the original area, remains of houses and paving; in the nearby wood of Passo Marinaro are the tombs of a necropolis of the fifth-fourth century BC. The Regional Archaeological Museum has a vast collection from prehistory to the early Greek period, in three pavilions and six rooms, with amphorae, furnishings, coins, grave goods, devotional statuettes and prehistoric flint objects and weapons; the excavations of Paolo Orsi, from 1896 to 1911, yielded much material, now in the Museum of Syracuse.
Visiting
The site is at the mouth of the Ippari, in the Scoglitti area, with the museum in the archaeological park. The sources consulted give no opening hours or visiting arrangements: check them.
Our editors' tip
According to other sources, among the remains in the park are those of a public bath of the Arab age used before entering the mosque, one of only two known in Sicily.
