3 Best Sights in Sicily, Italy

A vast archaeological site in a remote location, Morgantina long provided rich pickings for illegal excavators: when Italian detectives raided an 18th-century villa in Enna belonging to a Sicilian art dealer, they discovered more than 30,000 ancient artifacts, most of them plundered from Morgantina. In 1986, American archaeologist Malcolm Bell, director of the University of Princeton’s excavations at Morgantina, established that the heads, hands, and feet of 6th-century BC Greek statues of goddesses from a private collection exhibited at the Getty museum outside of Los Angeles also derived from Morgantina. Identified as Demeter and Persephone, the statues were acroliths, with wooden bodies (long rotted away) and marble extremities. Returned to Sicily in 2009 after a lengthy legal battle, they are currently displayed at a small museum in the village of Aidone, beautifully lit and hauntingly "dressed" by Sicilian fashion designer Marella Ferrara.

Equally powerful is the so-called Aphrodite Getty, or Venus of Malibu, bought by the Getty in 1987 for $18 million on the basis of provenance documents that were later proved to have been forgeries. Returned to Sicily in 2011, the hefty maturity of her body, revealed by wind-blown drapery, has led most scholars to identify her as the Mother Goddess Demeter. Other objects returned from the Getty include the Eupolmos Silver, a set of ritual dining ware, and a head of Hades, identified as belonging to Morgantina when a student working in the site archives discovered a terra-cotta curl of blue-tinted "hair" and suspected that it belonged to a head on display in the Getty. When the curl was sent to the museum, it was found to be a perfect fit, and in 2016 the head was returned to Sicily.

A remote and atmospheric archaeological site, Morgantina is quite beautiful, especially in spring when carpeted with wildflowers. In addition, it attracts few tourists, despite the fact that it hit the international headlines in the 1980s when it was discovered that several priceless but illegally excavated finds from the site had ended up in the Getty Museum in California. These have now been returned to Sicily and are on permanent exhibition in the small museum in nearby Aidone.

Here, Greeks and indigenous Sikels seem to have lived together in relative peace on a hill named Cittadella until 459 BC, when the Sikel leader Ducetius, determined to free Central Sicily of Greek influence, drove the Greeks out. By the following century, the Greeks had regained control of Sicily, and Syracuse, in the southeast, had become the most powerful city in the Mediterranean. Lying roughly halfway along the road that led from the east to the north coast of Sicily, Morgantina was rebuilt, this time on the hill now known as Serra Orlando. The ancient economy of Morgantina was founded on the cultivation of wheat, so it is little surprise that the dominant cults were those of Demeter, goddess of harvest and fertility, and her daughter Persephone. Even today, the site is surrounded by an ocean of wheat and cereal fields, and asphodels, the flower sacred to Persephone, are abundant.

In 211 BCE, the city was sacked by the Romans and handed as a war prize to Spanish mercenaries, who seem to have paid it little attention; according to the geographer Strabo, by the end of the following century, the city was nowhere to be seen. Excavations began in 1955, led by Princeton University with funding from the King and Queen of Sweden (who became regular summer visitors to the site).

Today you enter the site through what was once a well-to-do residential area where several fine mosaic floors, made with tiny tesserae, can be spotted in the foundations of large houses. Beyond, Plateia A, once the main shopping street, leads into the Agora, or official center of town, with a public fountain, several abandoned lava grain mills, an Archive office (where you can still see holes where documents were pegged to the wall), and a very ingenious system of interlocking terra-cotta water pipes, each with an inspection panel that could be easily lifted to clear blockages. Overlooking the Agora is a small but beautifully preserved theater  (where performances are still held in summer), and the stepped benches of the Ekklesiaterion, the meeting place of the town rulers. On the far side of the Agora, you can walk up through ancient kilns to the foundations of what was once the public granary—under Siracusan rule, all citizens had to surrender a quota of the grain they grew as tax. Above are the remains of two elegant private houses, each with a courtyard and mosaic floors.

The exceptionally well-preserved Imperial Roman Villa is thought to have been a hunting lodge of the emperor Maximian (3rd–4th century AD) and offers some of the best mosaics of the Roman world, artfully covering more than 12,000 square feet. The excavations were not begun until 1950, and most of the wall decorations and vaulting have been lost, but the shelter over the site hints at the layout of the original building. The mosaics were probably made by North African artisans; they're similar to those in the Tunis Bardo Museum, in Tunisia. The entrance was through a triumphal arch that led into an atrium surrounded by a portico of columns, which line the way to the thermae, or bathhouse. It's colorfully decorated with mosaic nymphs, a Neptune, and enslaved people massaging bathers. The peristyle leads to the main villa, where in the Salone del Circo you look down on mosaics illustrating scenes from the Circus Maximus in Rome. A theme running through many of the mosaics—especially the long hall flanking one entire side of the peristyle courtyard—is the capturing and shipping of wild animals, which may have been a major source of the owner's wealth. Yet the most famous mosaic is the floor depicting 10 girls wearing the ancient equivalent of bikinis, going through what looks like a fairly rigorous set of training exercises.