On an island in the middle of the Stagnone lagoon, off Marsala, one of the few Phoenician cities to reach us almost intact still survives. Motya was founded in the first half of the 8th century BC and, like Carthage, began as a Phoenician trading post: sheltered by the shallow lagoon, it grew into one of the leading Punic centres of Sicily. Its story breaks off in the early 4th century BC, when Dionysius I of Syracuse besieged and destroyed it — the moment when the catapult is first recorded in use; retaken by the Carthaginians in 396 BC, it never recovered, eclipsed by the new city of Lilybaeum, today's Marsala.
What to see
The piece everyone comes for is the Motya Charioteer, the marble statue found in 1979 and displayed in the Giuseppe Whitaker museum: a Greek masterwork of the highest quality, discovered built into fortifications thrown up in haste just before the siege. The rest of the island is an open book of Phoenician-Punic archaeology: the Cappiddazzu sanctuary, the tophet — the sacred enclosure where the ashes of children were laid — the kothon, the sacred basin tied to a temple of the god Baal, and the House of the Mosaics. Long stretches of the walls survive, with two gateways, on a circuit of about 2.5 kilometres, while toward the mainland the submerged causeway emerges, the ancient road by which chariots once reached the town. The museum holds the finds from the excavations begun by Joseph Whitaker in 1906 and from the La Sapienza campaigns that, between 2002 and 2012, rewrote the history of the site.
Visiting
Much of the ancient housing and the sacred areas can be visited in the open air, among the scrub and the vineyards that still cover the island: San Pantaleo — the name the Basilian monks gave it in the 11th century — has belonged since 1971 to the Giuseppe Whitaker Foundation, which runs both the digs and the museum. Allow time for the full circuit of the walls and for the museum, the heart of any visit.
Our editors' tip
Don't stop at the Charioteer: look, on the landward side, for the now-submerged Punic causeway, one of the few places where you can see Phoenician engineering first-hand. And give yourself time for the walls: their 2.5 kilometres show just how much defending this island mattered.