Pantálica - Necropolis

Well-maintained and signposted paths lead the visitor to the burial caves, the oldest of which date from c. 1270 B.C. and the latest from the eighth century B.C., before the nearby town surrendered to the Siculi. The oldest parts of the necropolis (12th-10th centuries B.C.) lie in the north and northwest and the most recent - Necropoli di Filiporto and Necropoli della Cavetta, ninth-eighth centuries B.C. - in the south. For many hundreds of years after 730 B.C. the caves remained deserted and neglected. In the Early Christian period some were used as dwellings and a few made into chapels.

The settlement linked to this necropolis, the capital of the Siculi people, lay in the midst of the individual cemeteries on a limestone plateau high above the Anapo valley and the Cava Grande of the Calcinara River. Of this settlement the only building to have been excavated is the anaktoron, a manor house dating from c. 100 B.C., the ground-plan of which is often compared to the megaron design of Mycenean origin.

Objects dug up from the Necropolis of Pantálica are now housed in the Archeological Museum in Syracuse. As well as skeletal remains ceramics and metalwork have been unearthed which suggest trading between the Siculi and Mycenean Greece, together with gold treasure from the Byzantine period.