Page 425 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

that the pieces had been stolen from Morgantina.

In 1988 Enna’s Public Prosecutor, Silvio Raffiotta, established that the pieces had
been sold to multimillionaire Maurice Tempelsman, last husband of Jackie
Onassis, via London art dealer Robin Symes. The Italian Ministry of Culture
attempted to negotiate for the statues’ return to Sicily, but with no result. In 2002,
however, Tempelsman donated the sculptures to the Bayly Art Museum of the
University of Virginia, on three conditions: the donation had to receive no publicity,

the donor had to remain anonymous, and the sculptures could not be returned to Italy
for five years.

In early 2008, the university finally succumbed to pressure and agreed to return the
statues to their rightful home, and in late 2009 the acroliths of Demeter and
Persephone were put on public display in Aidone’s museum for the first time,

“dressed” by innovative fashion designer Marella Ferrara. The exhibition marked
the beginning of a series of restitutions to Sicily of antique objects scavenged from
the site of Morgantina and sold to the Metropolitan Museum New York and Paul
Getty. Euploemo silverware arrived in January 2010, followed in 2011 by the most

important of all Morgantina antiquities: the so-called Morgantina Venus, a superb
example of late fifth-century BC sculpture, showing a mighty goddess, with her
drapery blown against her muscular, almost masculine, body.

Morgantina

Daily 9am–1hr before sunset • €6, or €10 including Museo Archeologico at Aidone

Five kilometres northeast of Aidone, at the end of a long cobbled lane, the site of
Morgantina occupies two quiet hillsides with gorgeous views of the valley below.
The car park is just under the east hill, and it’s around a 500m walk down to the main
entrance and ticket office, where you’re given a brochure and map: all the signs on the

site are in Italian and English.

After its demise in around 211 BC, the city became buried and forgotten for almost
two thousand years, and even after the site’s discovery it wasn’t identified as
Morgantina until 1957. To date, only a fraction of the city has been excavated, but the
finds have shed much light on the island’s pre-Hellenic Sikel population, who
inhabited central Sicily from the ninth century BC. In the sixth century BC, Chalcidian
Greeks settled here and lived in harmony alongside the Sikels until the city became the

centre of a revolt led by the Sikel leader Ducetius, who destroyed it in the mid-fifth
century BC. Swiftly rebuilt on a grid plan with walled and towered defences,
Morgantina reached its apogee in the fourth and third centuries BC under the
protection of Syracuse, and many of the surviving buildings date from this period. A