Officine purpurariae sulla costa di Siracusa

On the rocky shoreline of Syracuse the coast is hollowed out by some settings of artificial circular holes of various depths, some of which very large, mainly in three areas: S. Lucia, Cala di Massoliveri e Torre Ognina. In this contexts we can recognize some factories, presumably ancient, whose destination and functioning are so far unknown: in the past, funerary purposes, preservation of foodstuffs or lime production were proposed. These hypotheses however were not convinced. We propose instead a function, still not considered, of extraction of the purple dye: with some types of tub used to keep the purple shells alive, others to macerate them and heat the slurry to be filtered; as well as perhaps to purple dye the wool in place, using as mordant, instead of the alum, the sulfuric acid extracted from the processing waste of the murex molluscs