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 basins are embedded in the floor next to each other and separated from each other by partitions, the smaller area containing only one basin. Some lines for the filling and emptying of the basins are still visible. The pools were fed by hot and cold springs located nearby. The springs are now part of the Oriented Natural Reserve Bagni di Cefalà Diana and Chiarastella.
Roman remains are embedded in the bathroom wall, so there was probably a thermal bath already in antiquity. It is not clear if there was a spa at the time of Arab domination in Sicily or whether it was built under i Normans.
According to an earlier dating, some of the walls date back to Roman times, the columns from the Arab era and the band with the Kufic inscription from the Norman era. However, since al Idrisi does not mention the structure in the list of thermal baths in his book on Roger and the architecture can be said to be similar to the architectural style below William II, assuming that the building was built only in the late period of the Norman domination . (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
Information contributions: Ignazio Caloggero Web
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