Agrigento

Agrigento

The city was founded with the name of Akragas in 581 BC by the Rhodian and Cretan settlers of Gela and quickly became one of the leading centres in Magna Graecia, second in Sicily only to Syracuse.

Most of the buildings in the Valle dei Templi were constructed in the 5th century BC, all in Doric style and using warm-coloured local limestone; seeing them, today, blending in with the ground they are built on, like a natural part of the scenery, makes it difficult to imagine them coloured as they originally were, like all Greek temples.

The best conserved building, thanks to the fact that it was re-used as a Christian church in the 6th century AD, is the temple of the Concordia.

The temple of Giunone Lacinia, a hexastyle peripteral temple like the previous one, with twenty-five surviving columns, was the place used for weddings.

Little remains of the other buildings, e.g. those dedicated to Giove Olimpico, one of the biggest of the Grecian architecture, and Vulcano.

This is also the case of the temple of the Dioscuri, although the four architraved columns left standing have become the symbol of the city.

Finds made at Akragas and in its environs are kept in the Archaeology Museum, set up in 1967 in a zone where excavations have uncovered other traces of antiquity, e.g. the ekklesiasterion, a theatre-like structure used for gatherings of the people, and the Roman-Hellenistic quarter.

The old centre of the modern town extends to the north of the Valledei Templi. In the late 7th century AD, the population abandoned the valley and settled on the acropolis hill.

The appearance of the old centre, crossed by a maze of narrow streets that open into charming courtyards and small squares, stems from the period of Arab domain, which also left a legacy of place-names. Standing on the main street, Via Atenea, are churches and mansions, many built in very different styles.

Farther north stands the Cathedral, on which building commenced at the end of the 11th century; named after Bishop Gerlando, in subsequent centuries it was repeatedly enlarged and altered, as shown by the addition of baroque features to the other Chiaramonti-style Gothic and Norman ones.

Visit also the church of San Nicola, close to the Archaeology Museum, Santa Maria dei Greci, built over the remains of an ancient Doric temple, and the monastery of Santo Spirito, in the east of the city and now home to the Civic museum.