The spinning wheel that just stopped turning

Motya: unearthing a lost civilization by Gaia Servadio (Victor Gollanz, £16.99)

The dolce far niente (sweet languor) of Sicily has an Arabic tinge. The Arabs invaded the Mediterranean island in the ninth century, and they left behind mosques and pink-domed cupolas. The Saracen influence is strongest in the Mafia-dominated west of Sicily, where the sirocco blows hot from Tunisia. The town of Marsala was named after the Arab Mars al Allah, "Harbour of God".

Now Marsala is famous for its fortified wine. English merchants led the way in first distilling this Sicilian cousin of sherry. Today, a dusty museum there displays a letter from Lord Nelson to John Woodhouse, with an order to furnish the Royal Navy with 40,000 gallons of it. The Whitakers were the most notable of the English Marsala families. Like many Edwardian gentlemen, Joseph ("Pip") Whitaker was an amateur archaeologist and classicist. In a shallow lagoon off Marsala lies the vanished Phoenician island-city of Motya. Whitaker purchased the island and, in the hope of exposing its treasures, set up a dig.

Excavations began on the eve of the First World War and continued until 1922, when fascist officials obstructed the enthusiastic Englishman. A Phoenician sacrificial burial ground came to light, along with the alluring artifacts now displayed in Motya's tumbledown Whitaker Museum. Inside are Phoenician ceramics, Corinthian vases, and Attic black-and-red figure vases. Scarab rings from Egypt remind us that Motya was on the trade route to Africa.

Whitaker had been dead for 44 years when a spectacular Punic ship was dredged from the sands off Marsala in 1971. The prow's iron nails had miraculously survived uncorroded: rope coils, wine corks and olive stones were found preserved in the hold. According to Pliny, the Phoenicians invented the art of navigation; in search of precious tin, they had sailed as far west as Cornwall, and may have circumnavigated Africa.

Motya is tiny, just four kilometres square, yet only four per cent of it has been excavated to date. Archaeological investigations collapsed in 1987, due to the Mafia's interest in pilfering antiquities. And Gaia Servadio's marvellous meditation on Phoenician Motya shimmers with elegantly restrained anger at the island's fate.

The fly-blown Mafia port of Trapani, adjacent to Marsala, is infamous for laundering narco-lire (it has more banks than Milan). Its gangland hoodlums could easily turn Motya into a floating heroin laboratory.

Servadio, who has written brilliantly elsewhere on the Mafia, relates how Whitaker's team had to contend merely with tomb-robbers and random banditry. Then, the Mafia (involved in loan-sharking and citrus-fruit scams) was not the brutal metropolitan organisation it is now. Something creepy hangs in Motya's air today. When I visited, only 10 fishermen were living on the island, though the lagoon teems with mullet and cuttlefish.

For Servadio, the buried city is a "goldmine of knowledge" waiting to be discovered. Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist who located Troy and Mycenae, held a fruitless dig there in 1875. Whitaker hoped to expose evidence of the wool-weaving and dye works which the Phoenicians built: in the Semitic language, Motya means spinning wheel.

Servadio contends that the dark, wiry Phoenicians (who came from what is now Lebanon) were the "Jews of antiquity". For Homer, they were oily chancers and shifty traders. In 397 BC, the vengeful Greeks destroyed Motya and massacred its 15,000 inhabitants. "Silence fell," writes Servadio, and Motya became a "haven for migratory birds to Africa".

Written with infectious verve, Servadio's book also provides a fascinating account of the vanished Anglo-Sicilian Marsala merchants. The Whitaker villa in the Sicilian capital of Palermo was recently looted and burned. Joseph Whitaker's valet used to show visitors round its Louis XVI furniture and the slightly vulgar mahogany chairs, carved with the initials JW. No longer. These days, very few English people even drink Marsala. Motya is a lovely, melancholy book; and Gaia Servadio should be the city's 21st-century Schliemann.