Baths of Cefalà Diana
Baths of Arab-Norman age. (Text source: Guidelines of the regional landscape plan)
Seen from the outside, the building has the shape of a simple cube with unstructured walls. Only a half-height band of limestone blocks divides the facade. The Kufic inscription on this tape is shabby and no longer legible.
The interior consists of a single large room, covered by a slightly ogival vault. It is divided into two rooms of unequal dimensions by a triple pointed arch resting on two columns with Corinthian capitals. There are three window openings in the wall above the pointed arches.
In the larger of the two areas, three pools are sunk into the floor, one next to the other and separated by dividing walls; the smaller area contains a single pool. Some lines for filling and emptying the pools are still visible. The pools were fed by nearby hot and cold springs. The springs are now part of the Bagni di Cefalà Diana and Chiarastella Nature Reserve.
Roman remains are embedded in the bath wall, so there was probably a thermal bath here already in antiquity. It is unclear whether a thermal bath existed during the Arab domination of Sicily or whether it was built under the Normans.
According to an earlier dating, some of the walls date back to the Roman era, the columns to the Arab era, and the band with the Kufic inscription to the Norman era. However, since al-Idrisi does not mention the structure in the list of thermal baths in his book on Roger and architecture, it can be said that it is similar to the architectural style under William II , assuming that the building was constructed only in the late period of Norman rule . (Text: Wikipedia)
Card insertion: Ignazio Caloggero
Photo: Di Stendhal55 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110651190
Informational contributions : Ignazio Caloggero Web
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