PALERMOII-ARCHEOLOGICAL MUSEUM, TEATRO MAXIMO

We spent a lot of time at the A. Salinas museum, and we would recommend it to anyone who likes the Greek and Roman antiquities of Italy and Greece. I especially wanted to see the hangings from the temples at Selinunte and Segesta, and I was thrilled to finally see some of them. The rest of them are scattered around the world in other museums. A good part of what the Italians have managed to hang on to is now more or less displayed in regional museums, although there is a great display of Etruscan antiquity bought from a private buyer from northern Italy. No doubt someday attempts will succeed in returning this patrimony to its original area. Of course this is a worldwide problem: the Byzantine treasures in Venice sacked from Turkey, all of the Italian masterpieces in the Louvre in Paris, the Egyptian temple of Dender at the Met in New York City, American Indian art treasures in various museums. Anyway…
There was a school group there watching a movie that I peeked at and that movie was the first place where I saw the panels from the temples at Selinunte. They are hanging in a large room and they are just wonderful to look at. Pictures do not do them justice, but I have tried. There are many other treasures there, but that was the highlight for me.
The Teatro Maximo has wonderful acoustics. The operas there are probably heavenly, but we are not opera fans so will probably not go out of our way to see one. We could have gone to an Italian version of “The Three Penny Opera,” but I did not think I could bear hearing “Mack the Knife” in Italian. Anyway, our nights filled with social commitments, so we went to daytime performances, again with school kids. We sat in the wonderful opera house and could not believe the chorus and orchestra that gave an hour performance for the few hundred people there. I think there were more people onstage than in the audience! Later we attended another performance of strings in a side saloon that was a bit deteriorated but charming. These concerts during the day are sponsored by the government arts branch and it is certainly money well spent.