Terme di Sciacca - Italy

Terme di Sciacca

Sciacca (in Latin: Thermae Selinuntinae),  is a town and comune in the province of Agrigento on the southwestern coast of Sicily. Thermae was founded in the 5th century BCE by the Greeks, as its name imports, as a thermal spa for Selinunte, whose citizens came there to bathe in the sulphurous springs of Mount San Calogero, which rises up behind the town. We have no account of the existence of a town on the site during the period of the independence of Selinunte, though there is little doubt that the thermal waters would always have attracted some population to the spot. Nor even under the Romans did the place attain to anything like the same importance with the northern Thermae; and there is little doubt that Pliny is mistaken in assigning the rank of a colonia to the southern instead of the northern town of the name.

Terme di Sciacca: map