Agrigento

Agrigento, stretched across a hill overlooking the glorious blue of the Mediterranean enjoys its status of being Sicily's oldest and busiest tourist site. Although the town today is rather more infamous for being home to a number of the island's more notorious Mafia famililes (as many a burnt out building can bear witness to). We, along with many busloads of tourists had come to see the mighty Valley of the Temples.

Back in the 8th century BC this part of Sicily together with the regions of Calabria and Basilicata on the toe of the mainland formed a series of formidable independent Greek city-states collectively known as Magna Graecia. The reconstructed ruins here at Agrigento bear testimony to the success and wealth of this civilisation, with Agrigento, or Ancient Akragas, widely considered to be the most luxurious of them all.

Remains of the Temple of Hercules

Built towards the end of the 6th century

Temple of Concord

...built around 440BC and converted into a Christian church in the 6th century AD. Shame

Temple of Juno

Pretty massive eh?

Here were some truly amazing examples of ancient architecture, standing proud on a ridge above the sea... While three major temples have since been restored, the most magnificent, the Temple of Jupiter, which was never in fact completed, now lies in a pool of rubble. It would have covered an area of 112m by 56m with columns rising 20m high, supported by colossal human statues known as telamoni - totally massive.

A reconstructed telamon - once supported the very massive Temple of Jupiter

To give you some sense of scale...

One of the other more intriguing sites was of the blocks carved with what looks like a giant U. These were part of an ingenious pulley mechanism which enabled these early peoples - or rather their slaves - to hoist the blocks up into place.

Check out the U shapes on these blocks

We managed a good three hours or so wandering around the ruins on what had to be the hottest, most oppressive days of the trip ever. You know the kind, where sweat is literally running off you and your clothes are plastered to your skin, and you then run out of drinking water, and there is not a scrap of shade to be had anywhere. Oh the lengths one goes to in the pursuit of culture! Fortunately the archaeological museum managed to provide many a cool, dark room in which to recover, but the 1km walk to it, following the traipse around the temples very nearly did me in, and the afternoon had to be spent recovering at the beach...

!!!!!!!!!

SJ