Book Marinella Di Selinunte attraction tickets

Few places in Sicily compress so much history into a single coastal strip as Marinella di Selinunte, a small fishing village on the island's south-western shore where the Belice river meets the Mediterranean. The village itself is modest, a scatter of whitewashed houses and seafood restaurants along a sandy bay, but it sits at the edge of one of the most significant ancient Greek sites in the entire Mediterranean world. That proximity is the whole point of coming here.

Selinunte was founded in the seventh century BC by Greek colonists from Megara Hyblaea, and at its height it was among the wealthiest and most ambitious cities in Magna Graecia. Its name is thought to derive from the wild celery, selinon in Greek, that once grew along the riverbanks. The city was destroyed by Carthaginian forces in 409 BC and never fully recovered, which means the ruins were never built over, never repurposed into a medieval town centre or a baroque cathedral quarter. What remains is an extraordinary archaeological park spread across a series of low hills above the sea, containing the largest concentration of Greek temples in the world outside Greece itself.