A 19th-century traveler once described Calatafimi as a “sinkhole” and it must be admitted that, even today, it is not among the most gracious of Sicilian towns. Neither is it particularly prosperous. This may be the reason that there isn’t much of a Mafia presence there and is certainly the reason that emigration has continued to drain its population for more than 120 years. Its greatest claim to fame is that Garibaldi and his “thousand” fought the first battle for Italian reunification nearby in 1860; this explains the presence of a Via Calatafimi in almost every major Italian city. Its greatest tourist draw is, in theory, the presence of the temple of Segesta nearby but, in reality, very few of the visitors to that remarkably well-preserved and beautifully situated Doric edifice ever go a little farther up the road into Calatafimi. The current mayor hopes to rectify this state of affairs by attracting tourist buses to a new archeological museum located in the town, but the ultimate benefit remains questionable, given that there are few restaurants and only one, very modest, hotel.

The town name Calatafimi derives from the Arabic word for castle, qalat, and possibly from the name of the patrician family that controlled the territory under the Roman Empire, the Phimes. A contending interpretation derives the second part of the name from Eufemio I, Sicily’s self-proclaimed king who brought in Saracen mercenaries as personal defenders in 827, only to see them begin their own conquest of the island. Many other town names in the area have Arabic derivations — Alcamo (al-Qamuk), Marsala (Marsa Ali), Salemi (Salam) — and the mountains of this area were the last refuge of the Islamic culture that had existed in Sicily from the early ninth century until the mid thirteenth century, when King Fredrick forced Islam either out or underground. (The nearby town of Corleone, famous in Mafia lore, was called Qur la Yun by its Islamic inhabitants and was repopulated by a group of Lombards from North Italy after the Saracens were expelled.) Recently, Calatafimi-Segesta became the new official name of the town as part of the mayor’s enhanced tourism plan. Many inhabitants express consternation with this change; some are willing to give it a chance. No one, however, actually uses the hyphenated name in normal discourse.



In the fifth century BCE, Calatafimi’s part of Sicily was apparently a much more cosmopolitan place. On the grassy hillside facing a now isolated temple, a city of possibly 200,000 inhabitants stood. It was the center of the Segestan culture, which controlled the Northwestern corner of Sicily and claimed its origin in a partnership between a party of Aeneas’exiled Trojans and the Elymnian people of the local king Acestes. (Aeneas then went on —according to legend— to found the city of Rome.) The Segestans were, unfortunately, constantly at war with their neighbors to the south, the Selinuntans. At various times during this centuries-long conflict, they forged alliances with Carthage and with Athens, often using spectacular tactics of deceit and deception. (One legend tells of the Segestans gathering all of the gold items from their entire territory to be concentrated in the few dwellings the Athenian delegation would visit.) Ultimately, they got their Carthaginian allies to level Selinunte — whose massive and sadly beautiful ruins may still be seen just an hour’s drive to the south by autostrada. When the Romans conquered Sicily in the third century BCE they spared Segesta despite its previous alliance with Carthage, supposedly because of their common ancestry in Aeneas. Nevertheless, Segesta’s fortunes began to decline. Its population shifted to the nearby coastal towns that offered better trade opportunities and eventually, as the Roman Empire collapsed, the city was destroyed by the Vandals.