Mozia sizzles in the Sicilian summer sun. The flat island sits in a lagoon just north of Marsala on the west coast of Sicily. The Phoenicians founded a colony on the island in the 8th century BC and named it Motya.

They were a Semitic civilization that was located in what today is Syria, Lebanon and north Israel. The Greek gods descended from the Phoenician pantheon and it was the Phoenicians who gave us the alphabet that many Western languages use today.