World Heritage Site
Together with the city of Syracuse, Pantalica is listed as "Syracuse and the Rocky Necropolis of Pantalica" on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
In the first half of the 13th century BC, all the coastal settlements suddenly disappeared with the arrival of the Sicels and other Italian peoples. The indigenous population abandoned the coastal settlements and took refuge in the hills and unpleasant mountains chosen for their defensive value and they gathered together in great crowds.
Ancient accounts say the king Hyblon went to the edge of their land and founded Megara Hyblaea in the year 728 BC. But the later birth and expansion of Syracuse determined the destruction of the kingdom, expanding inland to found the city of Acres in 664 BC. The vestiges of that era are Palazzo del Principe or Anaktoron as well as a vast necropolis of some 5000 tombs in small artificial caves excavated in the rock.
The area around the necropolis wasn't only occupied during the Magna Graecia era, but also during the first centuries of the middle ages when populations displaced by the invading barbarians, pirates and, later, the Saracens looked for a safe refuge and found it in this near inaccessible area. Even today, there are remains of visible homes built into the rock when the area was part of the Byzantine Empire and also remains of the small painted chapels called Grotta del Crocifisso, Grotta di San Nicolicchio and Grotta di San Micidario.
Read more about this topic: Necropolis Of Pantalica
Famous quotes containing the words world, heritage and/or site:
“One of the most significant effects of age-segregation in our society has been the isolation of children from the world of work. Whereas in the past children not only saw what their parents did for a living but even shared substantially in the task, many children nowadays have only a vague notion of the nature of the parent’s job, and have had little or no opportunity to observe the parent, or for that matter any other adult, when he is fully engaged in his work.”
—Urie Bronfenbrenner (b. 1917)
“There are some things which cannot be learned quickly, and time, which is all we have, must be paid heavily for their acquiring. They are the very simplest things and because it takes a man’s life to know them the little new that each man gets from life is very costly and the only heritage he has to leave.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy. Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)