Page 396 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

restaurants that really only do business for four or five months of the year. A coastal

road westwards (served by Tumino buses) offers access to more beaches near Punta
Secca (not to be confused with the Punta Secca of Montalbano fame, which is just
beyond Sampieri) and Punta Braccetto, almost as far as the desolate remains of
ancient Kamarina (also spelt Camerina), a Syracusan colony founded in 599 BC. It

lies on a headland overlooking beaches on either side, and has a small Museo
Archeologico (daily 9am–1pm & 3–5.30pm; €4). Behind the antiquarium is all that’s
left of a fifth-century BC Tempio di Atena, surrounded by the rubble of city walls and
the various ruins of the Hellenistic-Roman city.

ARRIVAL AND DEPARTURE: MARINA DI RAGUSA

By bus Marina di Ragusa is served by Tumino buses from Ragusa ( 0932 623 184,
tuminobus.it),

< Back to Siracusa and the southeast

Gela

GELA couldn’t present a worse aspect: drivers have to negotiate a tangle of untidy
backstreets, while the train line weaves through a mess of futuristic steel bubbles and

pipes. Despite a few fine dune-backed beaches in the vicinity, it’s no place to bathe;
this is one of the most polluted places in Sicily, with a worryingly high rate of certain
cancers, and a chemical tang to the air. But it was not always so. Gela was one of the
most important of Sicily’s Greek cities, founded in 688 BC, and under Hippocrates in
the fifth century BC it rivalled even ancient Syracuse as the island’s political hub. Its
artistic eminence attracted literary stars, including the world’s first cookery-book
writer, Archestratus, and the dramatist Aeschylus, who, according to legend, met his

end here when an eagle dropped a tortoise on him, apparently mistaking his bald head
for a stone on which to dash its prey. However, Gela’s heyday was short-lived.
Hippocrates’ successor, Gelon, transferred his power and half the city’s population
east to Syracuse in 485 BC, the deep-water harbour there being more to the tyrant’s
liking. Gela was later smashed by the Carthaginians and the Mamertines, its walls
razed in the third century BC and abandoned to the encroaching sands. Modern Gela

was the first Sicilian town to be liberated by the Allies in 1943, but otherwise –
beyond an excellent archeological museum and a fine set of Greek defensive walls at
the Capo Soprano archeological zone – is almost entirely without interest.

THE GELA PAINTER

Many major museums throughout the world have black-figure ware by the so-called
Gela Painter, a prodigiously prolific potter and painter of jars who was working