Selinunte Metopes

Selinunte Metopes are the most arresting survivors of the Greek city of Selinunte, carved in the late 6th–early 5th c. BC to fill the square metope panels of Doric temple friezes. Now a focal point within Palermo’s Antonino Salinas Regional Archaeological Museum, their broken reliefs and vivid myths—Europa with the bull, gods battling giants—show how sculpture once turned story into a public language of divine power and cosmic order. They matter as rare, firsthand evidence of Sicily’s Greek world and its wider Mediterranean ties.