Grotte di Dedalo - Siacca

In the Vapor Caves of San Calogero in Mount Kronio you can admire a cave a few meters wide and about ten meters long, with about twenty stone seats carved into the wall.

These seats are said to have been created by the ingenious Greek architect Daedalus , inventor of lead and the famous labyrinth of the Minotaur.

The myth tells that Daedalus fled Crete due to the wrath of King Minos , who considered him guilty of helping his wife Pasiphae to deceive him with a bull, by building her a wooden cow to enable sexual intercourse.

After this episode , Daedalus and his son Icarus were imprisoned in the labyrinth , which Daedalus himself had built to imprison the Minotaur. The two managed to escape thanks to the wax wings that Daedalus had built, but when Icarus flew too close to the sun, his wax wings melted and they died.

The Stufe di San Calogero is an important speleothermal complex consisting of an exceptional geothermal phenomenon and a very important monument of Sicilian prehistory.

The cave is the deepest in Sicily and is influenced by a flow of vaporous air with temperatures varying between 37° and 39° : for thousands of years it has been the custom to stop at the entrance to obtain therapeutic benefits from the vapors, which come from the Sciacca hydrothermal basin below.

Entering (and especially staying) is unthinkable due to the very high temperature, despite the fact that the ancient monks of the area built seats.

Under normal conditions, the environment does not allow it to persist for more than 30 or 40 minutes, after which the organism succumbs to heat stroke.
A problem that today, in the age of technology, can easily be overcome with equipment and technical clothing.

The phenomenon of rising vapors is still studied today by the cave committee 'E. Bogean' of the CAI of Trieste.

It was precisely the CAI of Trieste that began in 1957 the exploration of the bowels of the mountain with a descent along the Medeot swallow hole at the bottom of which the Bellitti and Di Milia galleries were explored: the very high temperature - 40° here - and the presence of 100% humidity made human survival impossible.

At that time, the exceptional character of the undertaking, carried out with initial experimental preparations that allowed a stay, albeit short, in the tunnels, was enriched by the unexpected discovery of an extraordinary archaeological deposit.

This consisted of more than 40 large vases from prehistoric times, to be precise from the last Eneolithic period, but also human bones that still raise many questions about the nature of this 'depot'.

The hypothesis is that the caves were used as a burial place by prehistoric cave dwellers, a place that was no longer visited once the fumes began to rise.

Willem Vandenameele