Morgantina Ruins

Posted on December 20, 2007 
Filed Under Uncategorized

So this past weekend we headed out to Morgantina. Kind of a spur of the moment thing really. We were planning to go try and find a cork forest on the south side of Nescemi, but detoured when we saw the “National Park” sign for Morgantina. Plus it’s in our top 10 book we have for sicily as a place not to miss. It was about a 45 minute drive, Tom Tom took us there the senic route, lots of nice farms along the way. When we arrived at the entrance of the “park” it was a cobblestone road about 2 miles long before we hit the ruins. 3 Euro later the whole family was in. And we were the only ones there. This small town, really a neighborhood, was dated back to 2nd century BC. It moved around a little on the mountain, and was reconquered by many different groups of settlers. It was eventually abandoned in like 30 BC for unkown reasons. They discovered it in the 1950’s sometime digging an irregation ditch or something. The site is absolutely beautiful. There is plenty of green grass around to keep the dust down, the ruins have been pieced back together and they even have artist renderings of the view you’d have if you were looking in a certain direction. I know I’ve said this in the past but they don’t have all the rules out here about touching things, or any “chains” to keep you 20 feet away from anything. I would say they encourage you touch and climb, but they don’t seem do mind. I guess their thinking is if it’s lasted since 2 century BC, it will be here later too. I kind of have mixed feelings on the whole issue. Part of me says to the kids to stay off that, you don’t want to wear it down anymore. But the other part of me says, touch it, feel the texture. Can you imagine that being your bedroom, with all your brothers and sisters. The whole site probably covered an acre or 2, but was fun. We spend the better part of 3 hours there or so till the sun started going down and it got cold. There was a part up on the mountain we didn’t even see. But we’ll be going back in the summer again.

Oh on the way home we almost ran the car into a washed out road. Well not really, but if it had been dark we might have still been at the bottom of the gully. We were just clicking along the road and a giant sink hole about 25 feet diameter showed up in front of us. I mean it looked like a giant. There was no way around, so we had to turn around.

Check out the pics on our photo tab.

-Casey

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