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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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