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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. |
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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".
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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.
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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.
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| 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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