Page 123 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

Museo Archeologico Regionale

Piazza Olivella 24 • Closed for restoration • 091 611 6806
The cloisters and surviving buildings of a sixteenth-century convent – once the

property of the Sant’Ignazio all’Olivella church – now house Palermo’s Museo
Archeologico Regionale. Its magnificent collection gathers together artefacts found at
all western Sicily’s major Neolithic, Carthaginian, Greek and Roman settlements, but
unfortunately the museum has been closed since 2009 for long-overdue renovations.
These should improve the frankly old-fashioned displays, but you may have to take the
projected re-opening date of 2014 with a pinch of salt. The new layout was undecided

at the time of writing, but the highlights of the collection are described below.

In particular, the museum is the repository of the extraordinary finds from the Greek
site of Selinunte on the southwest coast, gathering together the rich stone carvings that
adorned the various temples (known only as Temples A–G). The oldest are single
panels from the early sixth century BC, representing the gods of Delphi, the Sphinx, the
rape of Europa, and Hercules and the Bull. Other reconstructed friezes are more vivid

works from the fifth century BC, like Perseus beheading Medusa, while the most
technically advanced tableaux are those from Temple E, portraying a lithe Hercules
fighting an Amazon, the marriage of Zeus and Hera, Actaeon savaged by three
ferocious dogs, and Athena and the Titan. Other Greek relics include the famous stone
lion’s-head water-spouts from the fifth-century BC Victory Temple at Himera – the
fierce animal faces tempered by braided fur and a grooved tongue that channelled the

water. Finds from the sites at Términi Imerese and Solunto are also here, as well as
rich bronze sculptures like the naturalistic figure of an alert and genial ram (third
century BC) from Siracusa, once one of a pair (the other was destroyed in the 1848
revolution). There’s Etruscan funerary art, a wide range of Neolithic finds (including
casts of the incised drawings from Addaura, on Monte Pellegrino, and Lévanzo), and a

series of beautifully preserved Roman mosaics – the largest of which measures nearly
10m in length – excavated from Piazza della Vittoria in Palermo.