Thirteen kilometres from the park, at the Cusa quarries, the column drums still lie where the cutters left them: some half cut out of the calcarenite bank, others already free and ready to be hauled away. Work stopped dead in 409 BC, when Hannibal Mago's Carthaginian army landed at Lilybaeum and marched on Selinunte. The city fell after a nine-day siege: 16,000 Selinuntines killed, 5,000 enslaved, 2,600 fleeing towards Acragas. It was never truly reinhabited, and that is why the site is what it is: 270 hectares of Greek ruins, the largest archaeological park in Europe.
What to see
You start on the eastern hill, where the three biggest temples stand, known by letters because we cannot say for certain to whom they were dedicated. Temple E, of 460-450 BC, is the only one raised again in full: its columns went back up with the anastylosis carried out between 1956 and 1959, and the peristyle measures 68 metres by 25. Beside it, Temple F is the oldest of the three. Temple G, by contrast, is a field of fallen drums, 113 metres by 54, eight columns across the front and seventeen down the sides, left unfinished after eighty years of work, with a single column re-erected in 1832.
Beyond the Cottone valley you climb to the acropolis, defended by walls and crossed by two streets meeting at right angles: here stand Temples A, B, C, D and O. Temple C, of about 550 BC, was raised again between 1925 and 1927; its metopes, among the oldest sculpture of the Greek West, are in the archaeological museum of Palermo, where they ended up in 1823 after the Englishmen Samuel Angell and William Harris had tried to ship them to the British Museum. To the north lies the residential quarter of Manuzza, laid out on a grid; to the west, beyond the Modione, the sanctuary of the Malophoros, dedicated to Demeter in the sixth century BC, has yielded some 12,000 terracotta votive figurines.
Visiting
The main entrance is at Marinella di Selinunte, a hamlet of Castelvetrano, on the side of the eastern temples. The Cusa quarries belong to the same park, but they lie thirteen kilometres away, towards Campobello di Mazara, and are reached by car. Inside, you walk a good deal: from the temple hill to the acropolis is close to a kilometre of dirt track up and down, and taking in the whole site without rushing needs at least three hours. There is almost no shade: water, a hat and closed shoes are not a detail, and in summer the middle hours of the day are best avoided.
Our editors' tip
We go for the last two hours before closing. The sun drops towards the sea, the limestone turns from white to amber and the columns of Temple E stretch their shadows across the stylobate; by then the groups have gone and all you hear is the wind. Afterwards, if the light holds, we drive the thirteen kilometres to the Cusa quarries: seeing a drum still attached to the rock, with the chisel mark on it, explains the city better than any temple.
