Temple of Segesta

Interesting facts

Each of the temple's 36 columns stands about 10 metres tall, built of local calcarenite stone.

Its builders used the subtle refinements of the finest Greek temples, including slightly curved horizontal lines and narrower spacing between the corner columns.

Some scholars think it was meant as an open-air shrine; others link it to Aphrodite Urania because of a later inscription found nearby.

Traces of earlier structures on the hill suggest the temple was raised on a site that was already sacred before the 5th century BC.

The temple survived intact when Carthaginian armies devastated much of western Sicily at the end of the 5th century BC.

Thucydides counted the Elymians of Segesta as non-Greeks, even though they minted coins with Greek lettering and built in the Greek manner.

The colonnade was restored in the 18th century by the royal architect Carlo Chenchi, and Goethe was among the Grand Tour travellers who came to see it.

Why it is worth it

The temple at Segesta stands alone on a hill in western Sicily, a complete Doric colonnade with nothing inside it. Six columns across the ends and fourteen along the sides, 36 in all, rise from a three-stepped platform about 21 by 56 metres, carrying their entablature and pediments almost intact after some two and a half thousand years. Seen from the road below against the bare hills and the sky, it is one of the most perfectly preserved and most dramatically placed Greek-style temples anywhere.

What makes it fascinating on closer look is that it was never finished. The columns were never fluted, as Doric columns normally were. The blocks of the base still carry the stone bosses — knobs left on for levering and lifting — which would have been chiselled off at the end. There is no cella, the inner room that housed a god's image, no altar, no known dedication, and the building was never roofed. It is, in effect, a construction site frozen in the 420s BC, which is why architects and archaeologists love it: every stage the builders did not complete shows how such temples were made.

The puzzle is who built it. Segesta was not a Greek city but the town of the Elymians, a native people of western Sicily, who adopted Greek forms while keeping their own identity. Some scholars have argued for an Athenian architect, at a time when Segesta was courting Athens as an ally; the more widely held view is that the Elymians built it themselves. Work stopped when Segesta went to war with its Greek neighbour Selinunte, and the temple was left as it stood.

The ancient city lay on Monte Barbaro, the higher hill nearby, with the remains of the town and its theatre; the temple, deliberately set apart, is best seen first from a distance and then walked around slowly, column by column.

Getting there

Segesta is in the comune of Calatafimi-Segesta, about 12 km from Alcamo and some 7 km from Calatafimi; Trapani is about 35 km to the west and Palermo about 75 km to the east. By car, take the A29 motorway between Palermo and Trapani and leave at the Segesta exit. The small Segesta Tempio railway station, on the line from Palermo and Trapani, is about 20 minutes' uphill walk from the site entrance, and buses link Calatafimi with the archaeological park. The nearest airport is Trapani-Birgi Vincenzo Florio Airport (TPS), about 30 km away.

Temple of Segesta

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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