Episode 1 Sicily: The Wonder of the Mediterranean

She's been fought over and occupied

by all the great powers of the Mediterranean.

Ravaged by many, lovingly embraced by just a few,

still haunted by her own demons.

'I'm Michael Scott. As an ancient historian,

'I'm on a journey to discover an island on the border of two worlds.'

HE SHOUTS

'As much North African as it is European.'

Sicily.

I want to know how Sicily's extraordinary history

has shaped the island we see today.

Is it too late to run away?

'How Sicilians, so rarely in control of their own destiny,

'have forged an identity and culture that is, well, so Sicilian.'

We live on a volcano,

but it's normal, yes!

'How they learnt to survive invaders and live with each other,

'to look forward to the future from a turbulent past.'

What calls the tourists here is The Godfather,

but what makes them stay is the sun, is the limoncello, is the granita,

is the coffee.

'I want to find out what Sicily's history and people can tell us

'about how to survive in an unstable world.'

We are giving an example to the rest of Europe -

welcome is the best guarantee for safety.

Head down, head down, head down.

Well, that seems to be the modern version of ancient sea defences,

just have some very low bridges trying to get into the town.

I'm arriving at the largest island in the Mediterranean, Sicily,

where for centuries people have come here using it as a stepping stone

between Europe and Africa,

and as a gateway between the east and west Mediterranean Sea.

Not all have come in peace, and yet Sicily's culture, identity,

its history is the result of that continual tidal wave of people

coming and going.

I want to find out what it means to be a Sicilian.

I'm in Syracuse on Sicily's east coast,

founded by the Greeks 27 centuries ago.

In the city's ancient heart is the Duomo, the Cathedral of Syracuse.

Today, this is a Christian church,

but to walk through its doors is to take a trip back in time

to 500 years before Christ was even born.

The Duomo began life in 480 BC

as the building project of a Greek tyrant,

who having beaten the Carthaginians in battle,

used the loot to build this.

And these are the columns from that temple, soaring up into the sky.

It was topped by a statue of Athena with a golden shield

that could be seen for miles around.

This building was a marvel for the Mediterranean before a single block

of the Parthenon had ever been laid.

The Romans, too, in their time

came here to admire and loot for themselves its artistic treasures.

And then this building saw the invasion of barbarian tribes.

But that was just the beginning of this building's story,

because then the Byzantines came,

broke through the inner walls of the old Greek temple and filled in the

outer colonnade to create a Christian church.

But then in the 9th century, the Arabs invaded Sicily.

The citizens of Syracuse took refuge here and were massacred before the

Arab conquerors turned this church into a mosque.

But this story does not stop there either,

because then the Normans came to Sicily, took it back,

turned this mosque back into a church,

raised the roof high and in every generation since then,

every newcomer to Sicily has added their flavour to this wonderful

building. So when you stand here,

you stand in the midst of 2,500 years

of Sicily's kaleidoscopic heritage and history.

What made Sicily so irresistible was its geography.

Poised on the toe of Italy,

just 3km from the European mainland,

in parts further south than the African coast.

Directing the sea lanes to flow around it,

to control Sicily was to control the movement of trade and people

in the western and central Mediterranean.

Sicily was occupied from early prehistory

by three different tribes.

The Elymians, the Sicans and the Sicels,

who buried their dead in rock-cut tombs

and probably gave Sicily its name.

But for me, the island's character was born in Greek myth -

a mysterious, dangerous land

in the shadow of Europe's largest active volcano.

I am here absolutely in the jaws of the beast that is Mount Etna,

this one-eyed Cyclops of a volcano.

This is a lava flow all around me

from the 1981 eruption that came crashing down here,

destroying everything in its path.

It's now 20 feet or so above my head.

It's no wonder that the ancient Greeks saw this place as the home of

the monster Typhon that had 100 snakeheads

and who did battle with Zeus

to be champion of the cosmos.

And when Zeus finally won,

he supposedly imprisoned him here, underneath Mount Etna,

and then threw the mountain on top of him to keep him there.

Just like today,

Mount Etna is probably one of the most well-known things about Sicily,

so you can be absolutely sure that the ancient Greeks,

every single one of them,

knew that this was a place where you had to be careful.

'Just as today, Sicily's ancient migrants risked danger

'and uncertainty on their journey to a new life.'

Ciao! Grazie!

The Greeks first arrived in Sicily here, in Naxos, in 735 BC.

They didn't need a harbour,

they had this wonderfully naturally protected beach to land on,

and their arrival here was part of

a much wider spreading out of the Greeks

around the Mediterranean world,

creating Magna Graecia - Greater Greece.

Sicily was never going to be the same again.

The Greeks arriving here, they were putting down roots.

And in the years to follow, many more Greeks did the same.

The result was a higgledy-piggledy spread of Greek cities around the

eastern and the southern coasts of Sicily.

We shouldn't think about it as a kind of organised colonisation or

imperial arrival, it was much more.

Different, individual groups,

doing things in their own way,

and all jostling with one another to thrive.

What all Greeks would do, however, soon after their arrival,

would be to build an altar to the gods,

to thank them for their safe delivery,

and for the foundation of their new home.

It would often be placed just on the beach here where they'd arrived.

Here in Naxos there was a very famous altar,

the altar of Apollo Archegetes -

Apollo, the founder of settlements and cities.

It was worshipped at, not just by the people of Naxos, but over time,

by all Sicilian Greeks across the island.

It was, if you like, a rallying call,

a point at which they could all believe that they were part

of something greater.

Like the Arab world today,

being Greek was a concept rather than a nationality.

Linked together by religion and language, if you spoke Greek,

you were Greek. Everyone else was a barbarian.

The word itself coming from the sounds that, to Greek ears,

non-Greeks made.

According to the Greek historian Thucydides,

the peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism

when they learnt to cultivate the olive and the vine.

Sicily's wine industry today owes its origins to the vines planted by

those first Greek settlers.

It's far too early in the day for a tipple,

the sun's just come over the yard arm,

so instead I've come in search of an ancient Greek wine press.

This is a palmento, a gravity-driven wine press.

I'm hoping that the director of excavations here at Agrigento

is going to give me a helping hand

to see this thing, once again, in action.

'Director Giuseppe Parello tells me he has his own vineyard,

'so he's the expert.

'We have 150 kilos of grapes.

'In theory, that's enough to produce 100 litres of wine.

'But before they go in,

'the ancient palmento's surface needs to be protected.'

The director's going to call the shots here on how we're making our

wine in our palmento-cum-swimming pool here today.

The first thing he's told me I've got to do is take off my shoes.

I guess the director is going to take the role of boss today,

he knows how to do this.

'Ancient Greek wine making meant treading the grapes by foot

'on a sloped floor, the juice running off into a collection basin,

'a method that continued in Sicily all the way up until the 1990s,

'when it was banned by the European Union on health grounds.'

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

The director's being very kind to me,

saying with the plastic making it so slippy,

he'll accept my slow progress, but if this was for real,

I would have been fired already.

I'm far too slow here in the process.

The other thing he's saying, which struck me as quite surprising,

is that if they were doing this for real, this would be a rhythm,

a process, people bringing grapes in,

crushing them and moving through.

No-one would want to interrupt that process with the natural need,

for example, to go to the loo, so you would just pee in here as well,

because, as he put it,

it's all fermented alcohol at the end of the day. I hope,

in fact I'm quite glad I think that the European Union outlawed this

process fairly recently!

THEY LAUGH

'Exports of wine and olive oil helped transform Sicily,

'generating wealth to build great cities and temples.'

Grazie.

So, the director's given me my next instruction,

which is, "Get out all the stalks."

Now, I sort of had this fanciful idea in my head that it was all

prancing around, dancing around in a wine vat pressing grapes,

and, actually, it's incredibly hard work.

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

THEY LAUGH

So, I finally got it, this is the speed he wants me to work at.

Blimey, slave driver or what?!

Got to produce, I've got to get on,

I've got to stop moaning and get on with it.

HE SPEAKS ITALIAN

-No?

-No, no, no.

No break, no nothing, that's it, I quit.

That's it, I'm done.

Io vado via.

Mi dispiace.

THEY LAUGH

'The treading of grapes may have been outlawed,

'but one modern vineyard has revived an ancient Greek tradition.

'Before Tito, one of the vineyard owners, could explain,

'we had to crush the grapes the modern way.'

So this machine...

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

..it not only crushes the grapes...

..it amazingly separates them from their stalks,

and then sends the liquid all the way in there,

to where it's going to be stored and fermented.

'Nowadays, wine is usually fermented in wooden barrels

'or steel containers,

'but here it's pumped into Greek style clay amphorae,

'buried deep in the ground.'

So when you feel it coming through,

the pressure is suddenly very intense, sort of bursts of

grapes and the grape juice coming through, filling up this amphora,

which is going to be used as the place to ferment the wine.

IN ITALIAN:

Tito is going to say when to stop for the fermentation to happen...

-Stop!

-That's stop.

Like in the time of the Greeks, huh?

'For the next seven months,

'the grapes are left to ferment in the amphorae.

'But, as Tito explained,

'producing wine the Greek way wasn't without difficulty.'

IN ITALIAN:

'Too much oxygen had entered the wine, allowing bacteria to grow.'

'The answer was to ignore the rules of modern winemaking,

'and leave the grape skins in the wine.

'The skins soaked up the excess oxygen, halting bacterial growth,

'allowing the wine to develop a unique character.'

IN ITALIAN:

'Tito has grown his business on the lessons of the past,

'so what does Sicily's history mean to him?'

IN ITALIAN:

'Sicily's history has rarely been settled.

'Even as the Greeks were planting their vines of the east coast,

'a rival group of migrants were arriving on the west.

'The island of Motya is just a short boat journey from the mainland.

'In the 8th century BC,

'Phoenician settlers from modern-day Syria and Lebanon

'set up a trading base on the island.'

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

'Archaeologist Lorenzo Nigro pieces together their story

'from the remains of the city they left behind.'

So, Lorenzo, where are we digging right now?

We are digging in a deposit

which is just at the side of the Temple of Astarte -

the major goddess of the Phoenicians.

As you see here in this ring, this goddess was the goddess of love,

-of fertility.

-And this is Astarte?

This is Astarte.

And you found this right here?

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

So, from the 8th century,

the Phoenicians are here, trading, living.

Do they do like the Greeks, who also arrive in the 8th century,

are they expanding their territory?

In Motya, they were so able to be in touch with the Greeks

and to be integrated with them.

Motya has to survive in Sicily,

so they used to have trade with the Greeks

and they absorbed Greek culture.

So what do you think motivated the Phoenicians to leave the East

and to head to a place like Motya in Sicily?

One of the major reasons was the situation in the Near East,

which was like nowadays, there were big wars,

there were big powers which was pushing,

and there were states which were very strong, so there were taxes...

It was a very...

bad economic situation.

There were also people travelling for religious reasons.

They wanted to build up a free place, free from taxes,

with a different approach to life, and they travelled with everything

but the wives.

The wives they needed to take from the local population, and this,

of course, helped them to be an integrating culture,

because they needed to be

in good relationships with local populations.

They weren't afraid to engage with and mix with other cultures?

Their religion was not only rules saying no,

it was just open to life.

And this is what we can say from these broken stones.

It's an inspiring vision of the past.

Yes, give us hope, for the future.

Perfect.

-Lorenzo, buona fortuna.

-Grazie.

'But Motyan independence was short-lived.

'In the 6th century BC, the rival Phoenician city of Carthage,

'just a day's sailing away in modern-day Tunisia, seized Motya.'

On the other side of the island is this - another crucial,

sacred religious area for the Phoenicians.

This is the tophet.

And here, the sacred well,

dating back to the earliest phases of the Phoenician settlement here,

typically round.

But just alongside it

is another good symbol of the Carthaginian take-over of this place

in the 6th century,

because the Carthaginians built their wells square.

They weren't going to use the Phoenician round well,

they wanted their own.

You can even see the hand and foot holds they've created,

so that people could get down to bring up that sacred water

for the rituals practised here.

But this tophet,

while it was obviously used for sacred ritual

and for dedicating objects to the gods, also has a darker side,

an aspect of Phoenician-Carthaginian culture that really sticks in the

throat, and it's right over here.

This is an area full of small stelae,

but also these urns that you can see,

dating to both the Phoenician and Carthaginian eras of this site.

And every single one of these urns

was filled with the cremated remains of children,

who many argue were intentionally slaughtered to honour the gods.

In effect, these people, this civilisation

practised human sacrifice.

Greek, and later Roman, writers

told how parents slaughtered their own children.

Some have argued that this was just propaganda,

put about by the enemies of the Carthaginians, but on Motya,

the evidence for sacrifice is growing.

-Come va? Grazie!

-OK, this is for you.

Thank you. So, this was found when?

In 1993.

OK. And we're excavating the contents today...for the first time?

Yeah, now we try for the first time.

So we take this

-with your gloves.

-Absolutely.

And then we start.

But these pots,

they look to me like a cooking pot.

It is, maybe this one was not used, but it's a cooking pot.

It's exactly the same.

So what have we got here, Sharon?

We put this,

it's very little, but...

It's a little fragment of bone.

Yeah. So, we take a little bag and

put inside.

-OK.

-I'll leave that there for the moment.

We could be working on this for some time,

but you've also brought one here from the same year that was found.

-Exactly.

-1993. That has already been excavated, is that right?

-Yes.

-And can we...?

Yeah, we can open it.

So what we're looking at here, the burnt ashes and...

Yes, bits of bones and the ashes...

Bones and the ashes of the baby.

What would the process have been?

The child, they would have been burnt?

-Yes.

-On an altar, perhaps?

-Yeah...

-Or somewhere?

Somewhere that we don't know, yet.

OK. And then their ashes gathered together,

placed in here and then this placed into the ground.

Before they cover, they closed.

-They would have covered it with a...?

-A dish or a bowl.

A dish or a bowl, wow, OK.

And then placed into the ground?

-Yes.

-In the tophet.

-Yes.

The question is, were the children whose ashes we see here,

were they sacrificed or had they died from any number of causes that

contributed to the very high infant mortality rates in antiquity?

Traditionally, this idea of child sacrifice has been used to separate

out the Carthaginian-Phoenician culture from that of the Greeks.

The Greeks wouldn't do that kind of thing, whereas they did.

Yet I don't think we can really see it like that.

Sharon, what do you think? Do you think this was a case of child

sacrifice? Or infant mortality?

-Yes.

-You think child sacrifice?

-I think child sacrifice.

We're both in agreement.

We think it could well have been child sacrifice,

but the Greeks and Romans didn't necessarily see that as

something horrible or abhorrent,

they just saw it as a different way of doing things.

Your culture does things one way, mine does it another way.

How we doing, Sharon, have we found anything yet?

Only little, little pieces.

Small fragments of bone.

Fantastic. But we're getting there, right, we're getting there.

-Slowly but surely.

-Slowly, slowly.

Slowly, slowly!

Child sacrifice was deeply embedded in Carthaginian culture,

but other ideas they borrowed from the Greeks.

The ultimate example of that cultural blurring between the Greeks

and the Carthaginians here at Motya is this guy, the Motya Charioteer.

Now, we know he was sculpted in the early 5th century

and he's definitely sculpted by a Greek craftsman, but after that,

he leaves us with a real problem,

because this guy's definitely a charioteer.

The long robe, the high, tight belt and here the fixings,

where a safety harness would have been put,

so if he dropped the reins,

he didn't lose them completely.

But a Greek would never think of a charioteer like this.

A charioteer was not a hero.

A charioteer was a lackey, but this guy, look at the musculature,

the pecs, the abdominals, the six-pack, the honed thigh, the,

quite frankly, impressive lunchbox.

And when you come round the back, it's exactly the same, the buttocks,

the backs of the legs, everything is tuned to the ultimate perfection,

uber perfection, one could say.

How do we explain this?

There's no good, satisfactory answer,

but one I quite like is this -

that the ruler here in Motya wanted to create a sculpture of a

Carthaginian deity, or perhaps a Carthaginian deity

that had become kind of mixed with a Greek deity,

but to do so, by the early 5th century,

the only sculptural language that could really command attention

across Sicily was that of the Greeks.

And as a result of that complex, cultural interaction,

diffusion and desire also to speak to the wider world,

you get this - a complete and utter one-off.

On the coast across from Motya,

Phoenicians harvested salt from shallow lagoons -

a legacy kept alive by modern Sicilians.

The warm African winds, the long summer days

and the shallow coastal waters in this part of Sicily

make this area fantastic for salt production.

It was a fact not lost on the Phoenician settlers

who came here some 2,700-plus years ago, and it's a fact still not lost

on the people who live and work here today.

However, most salt production today is done by machines,

however, I'm off to meet one family

who still do the majority of it by hand.

So, I feel like I've been given the trainee apprenticeship badge today,

with my yellow boots.

What we're doing is breaking up the salt.

So, originally, they'd let the seawater into one of the salt pits

out there. The warm winds, the warm weather would slowly dry it,

the water would get heavier and heavier in its salt concentration,

and then they let it into these fields,

where it starts to dry even more,

until this thick crust of salt forms under the water.

What we're doing today is breaking up that crust,

and then they're going to let the last layer of water dry off,

and then they start to harvest it.

-Sale del mare.

-Del mare.

'Work breaking up the salt began in the early hours,

'but the day quickly heats up.'

I want to find out

why they think, when there is a machine that could do this,

why they still want to do it by hand.

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

The guys are saying that this is the natural way to do it,

this is the way their ancestors have done,

this is the way it's been done for centuries.

It makes a proper artigianale product,

and they much prefer it that way.

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

THEY LAUGH

So we've started in on the Sicilian jokes,

and obviously the police,

the poor old police, are the butt of them all.

IN ITALIAN:

2,500 years ago, a battle was fought to decide Sicily's future.

A conflict that began between Greek city states and escalated into

all-out war between Carthage and the Greeks of Syracuse.

In 480 BC, the Carthaginian army

advanced on the Greek city of Himera.

The forces of Syracuse were waiting.

'The future of Sicily hung in the balance.'

All battles are, of course, horrific,

but there's something about being faced with the material and human

remains of a battle that makes that horror strike ten times deeper.

Here we have, these are shin guards and from its style

we know it's Iberian, Spanish.

So the likelihood is that this has been ripped off the body of

a Spanish mercenary fighting for the Carthaginians.

On the other hand,

this...

..is somebody's vertebrae, somebody's spine.

Most probably a Greek,

and what you can see still lodged in-between two vertebrae here

is the point of a bronze arrowhead.

This guy was shot in the back,

buried here in one of the mass graves of the Greeks.

On the other hand, over here we have perhaps even a sadder story.

We're looking at two feet and the bone analysis tells us

that they were in their 60s or 70s.

This wasn't a warrior, this was an old man or woman,

a local. And they, too,

you can see still embedded in their foot,

have a bronze arrowhead.

These objects speak to the traumas of war,

but they also speak to a moment in history when

rivers diverted, when Sicily's history changed dramatically.

It was confirmed as an island of the Greeks and not the Carthaginians.

The Greek victory was marked with a temple at Himera and at other sites

around the island and back in Syracuse,

with the Temple of Athena that would one day become the city's cathedral.

'Temples were statements of power as much as religious centres

'and with war booty filling their coffers,

'those that had sided with Syracuse could afford to build big.'

There's absolutely no way you could have missed this temple

when you were approaching this part of Sicily by sea,

as it sits here bestriding this ridge of landscape,

or indeed the other six temples that also occupied this ridge.

This was the Greek city of Akragas,

or the Roman city of Agrigento as they called it, saying to the world,

"We're here and we're a match for anyone who wants to take us on."

As the dark, thunderous clouds gather over there,

it's about time we pay homage to the king of the Olympian gods,

to Zeus the thunderbolt thrower,

and this is the top of one of the columns that once adorned

the building on all four sides.

This is a building built possibly by the people of Akragas, Agrigento,

to celebrate the Greek victory over the Carthaginians at Himera.

But it may also have been just simply because they were playing,

"Ya, shucks, boo, my temple's bigger than yours"

with the nearby Greek city of Salinas.

'But you didn't have to be Greek to build a temple.

'The city of Segesta belonged to the Elymians -

'one of Sicily's indigenous peoples -

'and they desperately needed to convince a powerful ally

'that Segesta was an important city worthy of military support.'

If you wanted a picture postcard perfect Greek temple,

this could well be it. The irony being, of course,

we're not in Greece and this town is not actually Greek.

But it was built when this town wanted to be on good relations with

the Greeks, particularly with the city of Athens in the second half of

the 5th century BC, so that they could have a treaty with Athens,

so that they could get Athens' help in their own war against other

Sicilian cities. But the double irony about this temple

is that it's not finished.

How do we know that? First off, the columns,

they never had their fluting applied.

No roof has ever been put on, and these,

these things I almost keep tripping over, these are the lifting bosses.

They would've been used to wrap ropes around so you can lift this

entire block into place and if the temple had been finished,

well, they would've been shaved off and smoothed over.

But here they are, running along all three lines of the building.

So why was this temple, such an expensive operation,

never completed?

Well, it may have been that Segesta had decided that

once it got its treaty with the city of Athens that it was aiming for,

it didn't need to impress Athens any more,

so why bother finishing their Greek temple?

What a waste.

'Unfortunately for Segesta,

'the treaty with Athens proved as empty as their temple.

'Instead of supporting Segesta, Athens decided to attack Syracuse,

'an ally of Athens' enemies back in Greece.'

In 415 BC, Sicily and the city of Syracuse became the major front

in the Peloponnesian War, the conflict,

the civil war that was tearing the Greek world apart.

The Athenian fleet sailed into this harbour and tried to take the city.

It proved a disastrous campaign.

After two long years, the Athenian fleet was finally destroyed here.

Those who managed to escape overland got caught in the marshes and those

who didn't die of fever ended up working in the quarries at Syracuse.

The abandoned charm of this place today

belies the cruel reality of its creation.

These are the quarries of Syracuse,

excavated by captives of war in the blistering heat.

'In 1609, the brutal history of these quarries

'inspired one famous visitor

'to imagine the horrors that played out here.'

The great painter Caravaggio was on the run from Rome

having committed "accidental murder".

He came to Sicily and while on the run,

he decided to take in some of the ancient sites.

He came here to the quarries in Syracuse and saw this and it was he,

Caravaggio, who first gave it its name - the Ear of Dionysius.

Dionysius was a great tyrant ruler of Syracuse

in the beginning of the 4th century BC.

And this man-made cave in the shape of an ear

extending some 65 metres back into the rock was, it was then said,

the place where Dionysius, the cruel warlord tyrant,

used to put his captives so that he could,

with its perfect acoustics,

listen easily and with glee to their screams.

'This rabbit warren of quarries was so inescapable that even the Romans

'would later commend it as the best prison to be found

'anywhere in the Roman world.'

And for those fateful Athenians,

the only chance of escape was to recite the words of the playwright

Euripides because Syracuse, for all his cruelty and majesty,

was also a great fan of drama.

Greek culture dominated Sicily,

setting the stage for every city to have its own theatre.

Segesta's theatre lies 400 metres above sea level,

on the slopes of Mount Barbarian.

Every summer, groups of local actors keep traditions alive by performing

Greek tragedies on a stage they build themselves.

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

So we've crept in on a rehearsal for tonight's performance of Sophocles.

Oedipus Rex, Oedipus the King.

Originally, this place would have held something like 4,000 people,

but frankly, it's the view that takes your breath away here.

How one's supposed to concentrate on what's going on on the stage,

I don't know.

I mean, I presume that's Oedipus.

Or is it Tiresias, the Blind Prophet?

So while the real actors have taken a rain break,

I thought I'd sneak on stage

to bring a little bit of Shakespeare to the party.

Much Ado About Nothing is Shakespeare's

most regularly performed comedy and it was written at the end

of the 16th century and it's set in Sicily, in the town of Messina.

It's a play I know a little bit about because I used to use one of

the speeches when I was little,

doing drama exams.

So let's have a little bit of Benedick, one of the heroes,

professing or realising that he's in love with a woman called Hero.

This can be no trick.

The conference was sadly borne.

They have the truth of this from Hero.

They seem to pity the lady.

It seems her affections have their full bent.

Love me!

Why, it must requited.

I hear how I am censured.

They say I will bear myself proudly

if I perceive the love come from her.

I can't remember any more. HE LAUGHS

Public performances were one way to keep the population happy.

But this being Sicily,

public performances with food thrown in were even better,

and as the Greek gods demanded animal sacrifice,

that meant there'd be plenty of leftover meat.

Welcome to the sacrificial altar of Hieron II -

the ruler of Syracuse in the 3rd century BC.

This guy believed in building big.

This altar is gigantic.

It's over 200 metres in length,

11 metres high,

and it's said that this thing could take simultaneously

450 oxen for sacrifice.

Now, that's enough meat for over 200,000 people.

That's quite an ancient Greek barbecue.

Hieron wanted to be seen as the equal of the great

Hellenistic rulers in the East,

the successors of Alexander the Great, and in building this,

well, he certainly gets himself into that category.

'Hieron's altar was dedicated to Zeus

'in his role as the deliverer of freedom,

'but by the 3rd century BC,

'freedom was in short supply.

'200 years after the Battle of Himera,

'Greek rule on Sicily was fading.

'Carthage had risen again

'and Rome was the new power on the Mediterranean block.'

For all that Hieron played being a big ruler,

he was, in fact, a rather small pawn in a much greater tectonic shift

in the power politics of the Mediterranean.

For this was the era when Rome took on Carthage

to decide who would be master of the Mediterranean.

A battle that took place on Hieron's doorstep in and around Sicily.

Hieron had formed a pact with Rome to keep Syracuse independent,

but in 214 BC, just a year after Hieron's death,

a Roman fleet attacked Syracuse.

'The Romans may have expected an easy victory,

'but one old man stood in their way.'

Archimedes - the great inventor, scientist, mathematician -

was a citizen of Syracuse. And in his 70s, he was called upon to bring

all that knowledge to bear to defend the city against Roman attack,

and he did it brilliantly.

He not only helped make their catapults more accurate

so that they could chuck stuff at the Roman ships,

but he also invented a machine called The Claw.

This was where an enormous kind of crane-like thing extended over the

walls of the city towards the sea,

where they would drop a huge weight into the front of the ship

and then be able to yank that ship up out of the water

where it would break apart, or capsize,

or everything on it would be tipped overboard.

The Roman general Marcellus complained bitterly.

He said, "Archimedes is using my ships as a ladle

"to put sea water into his wine cup."

This was a fantastic example of brains winning out over brawn.

Protecting the city's landward side was Eurialo Castle.

With great trenches to prevent siege engines coming close

and underground tunnels to speed defenders around the walls.

Frustrated in their attempts to take Syracuse by sea,

the Romans also tried to approach by land

where they met these formidable defences and where

it's likely that Archimedes had been working to improve the catapults

that were atop the fortification walls behind me.

The stalemate led to a two-year long siege of the city

and it wasn't until all Greek eyes were turned towards

an important religious festival that the Romans found their moment

to slip in through the walls and take Syracuse for good.

The question now was,

what was going to happen to the Syracusans and to Archimedes?

Now, supposedly, the Roman general Marcellus wanted Archimedes taken

alive, but the Roman soldier that discovered him

demanded that he drop what he was doing.

Archimedes refused and as a result the Roman soldier supposedly

killed him in the heat of the moment.

Now, it may have been that at that point Archimedes' body was lost,

but another story goes that a tomb was created for him.

A tomb that Cicero, the great Roman orator,

coming to Sicily centuries later rediscovered in the shrubbery

and upbraided the Syracusans for not taking better care of the tomb

of one of their great ancestors.

That tomb, if it did exist, is once again lost.

And for me, that same accusation still rings true today.

We have no idea where Archimedes' tomb may be,

but it's also pretty hard to find

any memorial to Archimedes' genius here in Syracuse.

For my money, he deserves a lot better.

Sicily was Rome's first foreign conquest,

its capture a key moment in the struggle to control the western and

central Mediterranean.

These were the Punic Wars, Rome versus Carthage,

that raged around the island and in the waters around it.

The eventual winner was Rome and as a result,

Sicily became Roman property, but it was never Italy.

It was always seen by the Romans as a foreign place.

They were Greek speakers here.

It was a place that the Romans could loot for nice art

and it was also a place that could

be turned into a bread-making machine.

And as a result, the landscape of Sicily was changed completely

to create these systems of grain organisation, grain production

called latifundia.

And at their heart would be a controlling entity.

A villa like this one - Villa Casale.

Its owner was a powerful player in the business of keeping the mob in

Rome fed and thus happy.

And thus the emperor in power.

Built in the 4th century AD, Villa Casale was decorate with some

of the world's finest Roman mosaics.

They give an insight into what life on Sicily must've been like

for Rome's super rich.

IN ITALIAN:

What Francesco's been telling me is that this extraordinary mosaic is

actually unique in the Roman world.

From Africa over there to Asia over there

and how they're all being brought to the centre, to Rome,

disembarked from the ships and taken off to be used in the gladiatorial

and beast hunt arenas.

And this chap right here, although we can't be sure,

there's no name attached to it, given that he is so central,

he must be an important person.

Perhaps he is the Dominus, the master, the owner of this villa,

but certainly he would've been here because this is the Basilica

where he would've been receiving his clients, his visitors each day.

So he was, in reality,

at the centre of this mosaic representation of the Roman world.

What I love is the sheer audacity of this guy to create in his villa

this beautiful mosaic,

putting himself as a sort of mini-emperor strutting around here.

Very much too big for his boots.

As people came to meet him,

they came as if from the entire Roman world,

meeting here at the very centre of it.

Mosaics were created to impress and with money no object,

this villa owner could hire the very best craftsmen in the Roman world.

This is a scene of games,

a set of games that would have been commonplace in Rome and once again,

we get the idea that this owner of this villa here in Sicily,

down in the sticks, wanted to have that little bit of Rome,

that little bit of the centre of the world here in his villa.

But what's fascinating is that actually,

he went much further afield than just Rome.

This seems to have been a man

who had significant interest in North Africa.

Not just perhaps with the transportation of animals,

but probably also land holdings.

The techniques and the craftsmen

that are being used here in these incredible mosaics

are coming from North Africa. He's bringing up teams of people

to do those mosaics from North Africa and

perhaps some of the material as well.

And there are two schools here in the mosaics.

One more traditional, more sort of stand-and-deliver.

The other much newer,

much more interested in movement and light and shade,

as you can see here as the girls move and dance,

the light is visible,

shining on their legs, and the shadows as well.

And, just as today,

so many people talk about the links between Africa and Sicily,

here back in the 4th century AD, we're seeing a villa owner here in

Sicily turning to North Africa

for the cutting-edge technology

and artistic creativity.

It was the peripheries of the Roman world in Africa

that were the engines of artistic interpretation

and representation in this period.

'For 600 years, Rome took much more from Sicily than it gave.

'The island's forests were felled to make way for fields of grain.

'And at the same time, no great roads were built or cities founded.

'Rome's greatest legacy to Sicily wouldn't be material,

'but spiritual.'

What's surrounding me here is not a series of individual baths,

but actually the final resting places of the dead.

This is the necropolis at Agrigento,

and it is from here that we can get into a secret underground world.

'As Christianity became more popular in the Roman Empire,

'it started to spread through Sicily.'

By the 3rd century AD,

communities across the Roman world had started burying their dead in

massive underground networks, tunnels and catacombs.

These would become particularly associated with

the Christian communities of the Roman Empire.

They would exploit already existing underground spaces.

Here I am in the middle of what is probably the entrance to a well

just above my head, or cisterns or quarries,

and use those as their access points to then dig tunnels out from

in every direction you can see.

Today, it looks to us fairly higgledy-piggledy,

but actually these would have been very well organised streets,

if you like, underground. Streets of the dead.

These would have been spaces not closed off and forgotten about,

but spaces in which living family members regularly came down to

to pay their respects to their dead.

When Rome fell at the end of the 5th century AD,

Sicily was occupied by barbarian tribes.

The Vandals from North Africa ruled for two decades,

followed by the Ostrogoths, a Germanic tribe who,

for 40 years or so,

united Sicily with their conquests in mainland Italy.

Something that wouldn't happen again for another 14 centuries.

'As Europe moved into the Middle Ages,

'Sicily was captured by the Byzantines,

'the Eastern Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul,

'by Greek-speaking Christians

'who shared much the same culture as Sicilians.'

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

'The first century of Byzantine rule passed off peacefully enough

'until an Islamic army came surging out of the deserts of Arabia,

'sweeping all before it.'

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

In the 7th century, indeed in 663 AD, the Byzantine emperor,

Constans II, the Bearded,

decided to move the capital of the Byzantine Empire...

Grazie.

..from Constantinople back to the centre of the Mediterranean,

to Sicily, to the city of Syracuse.

This was to counteract the new threat of the Byzantine world,

coming up from Africa and down from Italy,

and Constans II made this his capital.

It wasn't good news for the Sicilians,

or particularly the Syracusans, they were taxed beyond all measure.

THEY SPEAK ITALIAN

I absolutely love a cut-throat shave,

and Signor Corrado is an expert.

He has been here in this shop since the '80s,

and he has been cutting hair and

doing cut-throat shaves for many years before that.

This is a real expert at work.

'The next five years were a nightmare for Sicilians,

'as Constans ran the island dry

'to fund a counteroffensive against his enemies.'

Constans II thought that Syracuse would understand him.

It was, after all, a very Greek city.

But just a short five years after he moved the entire capital of the

Byzantine Empire here, he was murdered in his bath.

He was murdered in his bath by his servant who supposedly hit him

over the head with a bucket.

Grazie...

So, thankfully, I am no longer bearded,

and although Signor Corrado has offered to wash my hair as well,

I think I'll say no to that one.

Grazie, Signor Corrado.

'The bath bucket murder effectively ended the Byzantine Empire's

'last chance of halting the advance of Islam.

'Now, the Arab armies were gathering on the shores of North Africa.

'The story of what happened when Christian Sicily met Islam

'is for next time. But for now,

'I'm keen to celebrate what I think is one of the greatest Arab gifts

'to the island.

'The slushy iced dessert that Sicilians have made all their own.'

This is Sicilian breakfast.

This is granita, a Sicilian ice cream,

coffee flavoured with cream on top.

And brioche.

Ice cream for breakfast.

This is my kind of town.

I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to be dunking and eating,

or using my spoon, or sucking it through the straw.

It's all a bit...

I guess it's every man to himself to decide how he wants to eat this.