Excursion in Caltagirone: discovering the archeological site of Sant’Ippolito

During your holiday in Catania, you decided to do an excursion toward Caltagirone. After having seen all the many beauties of the place, let’s do a tour of the surrounding territory. Because in the northern area of the city there’s the archeological site of Sant’Ippolito.

The archeological site

It’s 4 kilometers far from the inhabited center of Caltagiore, and it’s on a steep-sided little relief called Sant’Ippolito hill or Colle del Bersaglio. The zone conserves inestimable traces of a very ancient past:

• The excavations of 1928 unearthed two villages of the Neolithic and Chalcolithic eras. The area was inhabited since the VII century b.C., when the Greek colonization started.
• The Neolithic village was built on the Eastern plain: in fact there are numerous findings like rests of fireplaces, fragments of hatchets, arrow-heads, ceramic fragments of “Stentinello” (decorated with geometric motifs)
• There’s a necropolis near the village: it included some tombs called “a forno”, which means they were hollowed in the slope.
• The peak of the hill was inhabited since the Neolithic era. Here, during the Bronze age, a second village was built, bigger than the first, which was active until the Iron Age.
• There were numerous finds of the typical ceramic production of that era, characterized by dark lines and triangles on a yellow background: an ovoid flask, an hemispheric vase with a cylindrical spout, fruit bowls with conic base.

All the findings unearthed from the archeological site are conserved in the regional archeological Museum “Paolo Orsi” of Syracuse, in the Ceramic Museum of  Caltagirone, in the archeological section of Musei Civici.

How to reach

From Caltagirone, take the state road 124 to north (toward San Michele di Ganzaria). Just before the exit, take the little paved street on the right and go on toward Sant’Ippolito. From Caltagirone, the trip lasts less than 10 minutes by car.

More information

For further information about the Sant’Ippolito archeological site, you can visit the dedicated page on he official site of the municipality of Caltagirone, Comune.caltagirone.ct.it.

Image source : “Ippolito1” di Classe I M L.S. ‘Archimede’ – Acireale a.s. 2008-09 – Opera propria. Con licenza Pubblico dominio tramite Wikimedia Commons