The columns everyone photographs at sunset have been standing since 1959: Temple E is the best preserved at Selinunte, but its present look is the result of a contested anastylosis, a reassembly using the original blocks. It went up towards the middle of the fifth century BC on the foundations of older buildings, and an inscription on a votive stele says it was dedicated to Hera; some scholars, arguing from structural parallels, prefer Aphrodite.
What to see
The temple is peripteral and hexastyle: six columns across the front and fifteen along each side, giving an unusually elongated plan of 25.33 by 67.82 metres; the columns stand 10.19 metres high and still carry traces of the stucco that once covered them. Inside you climb in stages: ten steps lead to the entrance on the east, six more to the narrow naos, which has no internal colonnade, and six more to the adyton at the far end; behind it, cut off by a wall, is the opisthodomos. All the optical devices of the Doric order are here, from the strong tapering of the columns to the corner contraction and the widening of the last metopes.
Visiting
The temple stands on the hill east of the acropolis, inside the archaeological park of Selinunte, in the territory of Castelvetrano. The figured metopes of the frieze, dated to around 470 BC, are no longer on site: the surviving ones, showing Heracles and the Amazon Antiope, the marriage of Hera and Zeus, Actaeon torn apart by the hounds of Artemis and Athena killing the giant Enceladus, are in the Antonino Salinas regional archaeological museum in Palermo. On the female figures the heads and bare flesh were carved in Parian marble, the rest in local stone.
Our editors' tip
Come in the late afternoon, when raking light brings out the curve of the columns. And know what you are looking at before you arrive: without the metopes, which are in Palermo, the frieze tells half the story.