Gaia Servadio was not the first person to fall under the spell of the tiny island off the coast of Sicily, revealed as the site of one of the great centres of Phoenician civilisation. Once a city teeming with over fifteen thousand inhabitants, Motya - just across the Mediterranean from Carthage - was destroyed by the Greeks in 397 BC after an extended siege. Its inhabitants were massacred, its buildings left to rot.
By the late nineteenth century those buildings had long since disappeared under the sands. Heinrich Schliemann, immortalised as the man who discovered Troy, undertook excavations on the island without making any conclusive discovery, but the English amateur archaeologist Joseph Whitaker was not so easily put off. He bought the island and began digging, with the result that Motya has yielded a stream of discoveries - buildings, pottery and statuary - and is now the major source of our knowledge of the Phoenicians.
'Motya' is the magical story of that discovery.
