- TRAPANI, Sicily, March 5 (Reuters) - Sicilian fishermen have found a bronze
statue of a man, believed to date from ancient Greek times, while fishing
off the Mediterranean island, Italian culture officials said on Thursday.
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- ``It's a very important discovery,''
said Rosalia Camerata Scovazza, the top cultural official in Trapani, in
western Sicily, adding that the figure probably dated from the late Hellenic
period.
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- She said the hollow bronze, measuring
1.8 metres (six feet) tall and one metre (three feet) across the shoulders,
was a representation of Wind. The fishermen found it on Wednesday.
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- The statue was found in international
waters some 60 miles off the coast of Sicily. Culture officials had already
asked the Italian navy to search the area after one of the statue's legs
was found by other fishermen last June.
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- The statue now has only one leg and no
arms. One arm came off as it was being hauled to the surface and the other
had already been lost.
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- Culture officials declined to comment
further until they could examine the statue more closely. It was being
immersed in a bath of non-salt water to clean it.
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- The ancient Greeks regarded the shores
of Sicily and southern Italy as the limits of the inhabited earth. Many
scenes from Greek mythology are set in the area and there are references
to it in Homer's Odyssey.
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- The Greeks founded a large number of
colonies on the southern Italian and Sicilian coasts in the eighth century
BC, known as ``Magna Graecia.''
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- The sixth and fifth centuries BC were
the height of Greek civilisation in Italy, but inter-city rivalries and
Carthaginian raids led to decline, culminating in the Roman conquest at
the end of the third century BC.
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