Museo Archeologico Salinas

The story

The museum occupies the 17th-century complex of the Oratorian fathers of San Filippo Neri all’Olivella and was founded in 1866, when the collections of the university and the suppressed convents were brought together in a single national museum. It is named after Antonino Salinas, the archaeologist who directed it for forty years across the turn of the 20th century and left it his own collection.

The heart is the room of the Selinunte metopes, the reliefs that decorated the temples of the Greek colony between the 6th and 5th centuries BC: Perseus beheading Medusa, Heracles, Zeus and Hera. There are also the Palermo Stone, a fragment of Egyptian annals of the Old Kingdom, and the bronze Ram of Syracuse.

It reopened in 2017 after a long restoration.

Why it is worth it

You enter through a cloister with a fountain and palms, and already you feel at ease. Then you reach the metope room, and the reliefs look back at eye level: Perseus with his sword, Medusa grinning, Athena watching. These stones were carved two and a half thousand years ago and still carry a force that photographs miss. It is the calmest museum in the centre.