Monte San Mauro
A few km S of Caltagirone is the site of an indigenous village over which, in the second half of the 7th c. B.C., there developed a Greek center. Rightly considered a true sub-colony of Gela, it was needed to control the valley of the river Maroglio and the nearby mountain range of Caltagirone. This center was destroyed at the beginning of the 5th c. B.C., probably during the wars between Gela's tyrant Hippokrates and the Sicilian and Chalkidian towns.
The archaic Greek settlement, with simple two-room houses of rectangular plan, stretched across the slope of a natural depression closed on one side by five small hills. On one of these, polychrome terracotta revetments from a small shrine were found, of typical Geloan shape and manufacture. On another hill was uncovered a rectangular structure once believed to be a pre-Hellenic anaktoron of the 8th c. B.C., but now considered a small shrine of Greek type dating from the 6th c. B.C. This building contained the fragments of a bronze plaque with a well-known inscription giving legal instructions in Chalkidian alphabet and dialect, a document which testifies to the relations existing between the Rhodio-Cretan area of Gela and the neighboring Chalkidian colonies. The necropolis was totally Greek, both in the type of its graves and in the funerary gear, which included Corinthian, Ionic, and Attic black-figure vases. This site is also the source of a well-known limestone relief with sphinxes and a dance scene, at present in the Caltagirone Museum. The material from the excavation is in the Syracuse Museum.
BIBLIOGRAPHYP. Orsi, MonAnt 20 (1911) cols. 729ff; E. Pais, RendLinc (1895) 279f; T. Dunbabin, The Western Greeks, 115ff; D. Adamesteanu, ArchCl 7 (1955) 183ff; P. Orlandini, Kokalos 8 (1962) 89f.
P. ORLANDINI