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SCOPELLO - I FARAGLIONI
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| Scopello is perhaps
the more evocative and colorful place of the entire gulf of
Castellammare. It is a small village risen at the end of the
18th century around the "baglio", on a previous
arab country house. In the low-lying wonderful cove limited
by the stacks and protected by old towers, there is the "tonnara"
(thunny-fishing structure), known sine a long time ago (it
is mentioned in documents of the year 1200); it has worked
until few years ago, together with the"baglio",
the buildings and the warehouses. |
| You can reach it
from Castellammare driving through the state street 187 in
the direction of Trapani, deviating at Km 32.4, passing the
bay of Guidaloca on which there is a 16th century cylindrical
tower. The name of Scopello probably derives from the Greek
"scopelos" (rock), from the Latin "scopellum"
(rock) and from the arab "iscubul iactus" (high
rock). It has been inhabited since the prehistoric period
(finds discovered in the caves of the inland document the
human presence, starting from the palaeolithic period), the
zone has been known since ancient times because of the abundance
of tunnys, which were fished in its sea, so much that the
Greeks called it "Cetaria", that means "earth
of the tunnys". |
| The Arabs founded
there a country house, which was inhabited by fishermen and
shepherds and, in 1235, Frederic II the Swabian, after having
annexed it with all the feud to the city Mounte San Giuliano,
granted the property to a group of settlers of Piacenza, who
soon left because of the continuous piratic incursions. In
those centuries, in fact, the pirates who infested the low
Mediterranean sea, used the bay of Scopello as a base for
their raids: mooring the ships behind the stacks, they were
practically invisible from the open sea. |
| The towers give
to the landscape a mystery halo and a fascinating atmosphere,
which mixes together nature and history. They go back to different
ages and they were part of a system of defense and communication
distributed along all the perimeter of the Sicily: communicating
among themselves through the fire, by night and with the smoke
during the day, all the island could be informed in very little
time of every military new. |
| The oldest, probably
built up by the Arabs to protect the "tonnara",
is the one that rises on the stack that was once connected
to the mainland, which could be approached through a bridge
or probably a scale that was carved in the rock itself The
Doria tower, from the name of the Spanish nobleman who let
it build on the terrace that faces the bay, goes back to the
XVII century. Another one, the Bennistra tower, is the one
built in the XV century on the top of a mount in the south
of the "baglio" and that dominates from its exceptional
point of observation the entire gulf of Castellammare. |
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