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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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