Castelvetrano

The name means castle of the veterans: Castrum Veteranorum, from the fort assigned to Selinuntine veterans — colonists or old soldiers tied to the Greek city next door. It is the sign that after antiquity people never stopped living here. And in the town's arms there is a golden palm with the motto Palmosa Civitas Castrum Vetranum: «palm-rich» is the adjective Virgil gives Selinunte in the third book of the Aeneid. The town, in short, introduces itself by quoting the Aeneid about the ruins beside it.

Those ruins are one of the largest archaeological parks in Europe. Selinunte, founded by colonists from Megara Hyblaea, reached a hundred thousand inhabitants in the sixth and fifth centuries BC; then, in 409, the Carthaginians took it after only nine days of siege. It was repopulated with its own refugees, taken again, and at last, in 250, it was the Carthaginians once more who evacuated its people: a city emptied by its conquerors. There remain the Doric temples between the sea and the fields of wild celery that gave it its name, the acropolis on the dunes and the quarries of Cusa, with the column drums abandoned half-worked. In town, the bronze Ephebe is the museum's jewel; the Teatro Selinus has Doric columns quoting the temples and a curtain painted with Empedocles among the Selinuntines; and the princes' palace stands on the old castle, of which an octagonal tower survives — in place of another tower, in the seventeenth century, they put a church, which together with the palatine chapel is a unique Sicilian case of a church on an upper floor. The gate now called Garibaldi, which is of 1626, was once the Porta di Mare, because from there you went down to Selinunte. The black bread of Castelvetrano and the nocellara olive of the Belice do the rest.