This morning we took off for a couple-of-hour drive to the southwestern coast, to Sicily’s biggest tourist site, Agrigento.  The Valley of the Temples here is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and with good reason.  It is another huge setting, some 3,000 acres total, and more ruins are visible than were seen at Selinunte.  It lies on the shoreline, down the hill from a fairly ugly city also named Agrigento, but you can pretty much just avoid looking in that direction and find yourself drifting back in time.  This Doric Greek city was, at its prime in the fifth century B.C., the fourth largest city in the known world with a population of at least 200,000.  It is to some extent emblematic of most of Sicily in that it has had a lot of owners.  This one location was held successively by Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans.  This pattern is repeated all over Sicily and the constant theme of conquest, never being in control of their own destiny, seems to have made a pretty deep imprint on the national psyche according to observers.

The remains today include an impressive line of temples built on a ridge downhill of the ancient city.  One, called the Temple of Concord, is amazingly well preserved, due in part to its conversion to a Christian basilica in the 6^th century A.D. and also because it was built on a layer of soft clay that acts as a shock absorber in earthquakes (apparently a better clay than the Bootlegger Cove clay in Anchorage that collapses in quakes taking structures with it).  The Christian alterations of the Temple have gradually been removed and it appears in nearly all of its original splendor (architectural, that is; the vibrant colors that decorated Greek temples are long gone).  Its image is famous as the model for the UNESCO symbol.

Other temples on the ridge are in lesser stages of restoration, or none at all.  The latter are the more interesting.  For example, at the Temple of Herakles, only 8 of the original 38 columns are standing.  The column parts lying around illustrate one of the building techniques, a square hole hollowed out in the center of each drum that was stacked to make a column, with the holes being where a lead joint would be inserted to hold the drums aligned properly (rather like a dowel in furniture).  The nearby Temple of Zeus has no standing columns, but the site is littered with its constituent parts.  There are large blocks showing a deep U-shaped groove, where rope was channeled when raising the block.  This temple had unusual columns.  Unlike most, its columns were not free standing but rather were half columns (lengthwise) that were embedded in stone walls, and the site is littered with segments of these columns.  There were enormous (over 23 feet tall) stone figures (called telemones) that were apparently used to hold up some part of the edifice.  (The local museum has models showing how this might have worked, as well as a reassembled telemone that towers over a puny human.)  This Temple of Zeus would have been the largest Doric temple ever built, but was never finished because Carthage sacked the city in 406 B.C. (someone was always sacking the city) and the incomplete structure was eventually felled by an earthquake.

The far end of the ridge has an interesting temple, purportedly honoring the twins Castor and Pollux (Gemini), where a small corner of four columns strikingly remains.  However, these were reassembled in 1836 from unrelated pieces that were found lying around the site, and so the presentation is not at all what any one time period’s structure would have been.  Still a picturesque sight, but somewhat odd in its historical inaccuracy.  Next to this temple is a sanctuary area that contains a large stone circle and an adjacent stone square which were both used by female celebrants to make offerings and conduct sacrifices of small pigs to the earth deities Demeter and Kore.  Craig’s concerns were later assuaged when we learned that the sacrificed pigs were not wasted but in fact became part of a large barbeque.  He is betting on a vinegar-based sauce as the Greeks were very clever.

Also scattered within the site are several structures of more recent origin, such as early Christian burial grottos and a necropolis, and Byzantine tombs excavated in the old city wall.  A bit up the hill from the temple ridge is the Museo Archeologico, in which we spent a couple of hours seeing a large number of artifacts found at the Agrigento sites such as carvings from the temples, the aforementioned telemone from the Temple of Zeus, as well as bowls, amphorae, plates, jewelry, and other useful items for the afterlife which were typically buried with a person.  One huge gallery was completely devoted to Grecian urns (Craig was moved to begin an ode, but, lacking the requisite talent, did not complete it).  A necropolis (graveyard) is clearly a treasure mine of materials for archaeologists and museums.  The burial items found here indicated that Agrigento was a commercial center trading with civilizations all over the Mediterranean world.  Phyllis was particularly touched by the alabaster sarcophagus for a child, dating from Roman times, delicately carved with scenes from the child’s life, from birth through driving his own miniature chariot.  His parents were clearly wealthy, but all one could really take away from several moments of silence was how devastated they were.

Our ancient history lesson over, we headed on down the coast road to Sciacca, which we expected to be barely an hour’s drive.  We were almost there, within about 6 kilometers, when the road abruptly took a detour that turned out to cost us an extra hour, taking increasingly small and winding roads up the valley and into several mountain villages.  As we went further and further inland, Craig grew more and more anxious, fearing we would be halfway back to Cefalu before turning the corner and heading down valley in the dark, but Phyllis thought it was just another “Learning and Discovery” and implored him to chill.  It was indeed still daylight when we arrived in Sciacca.  Having learned our lesson about driving half blind around these older cities with narrow medieval centers, we stopped and parked along the corso (main street, albeit still narrow) and walked to the address of the Fazio B&B, which was not far away.  Unexpectedly, the proprietors, the elder Fazios it turned out, spoke no English.  “Unexpected” because we had gotten a phone call on Phyllis’ conveniently unlocked iPhone with Italian SIM card this morning confirming our arrival time, all in good English.  With much hand waving and pointing out on the street, we discussed potential parking, because the spot where we’d left the car was clearly for only an hour, even to our limited Italian vocabulary.

Mr. Fazio finally smiled and waved us to follow him, and we walked to the car whereupon he proceeded to hop in the driver’s seat, drive it to the B&B’s street and maneuver it into the tiniest parking space we had ever seen.  This was accomplished with much back and forth, on a hill, with manual transmission, an inch at a time.  When he finished there was a total of maybe ten inches combined of space from the two cars in front and behind us.  We had seen cars all over Sicily parallel parked with what looked like NO room to spare, literally bumper to bumper, but we had never witnessed one in progress before, much less participated in it.  In the back seat, Phyllis kept cringing at the thought of what the car rental company would say.  But Mr. Fazio achieved perfection, with only a couple of gentle bumps, and we walked the block to the B&B complimenting him over and over.  (This did not prevent us from checking on the car whenever we went out later until we found an opportunity, when the car parked just on our front bumper had left, to maneuver into a little more space.  Otherwise, Phyllis was not sure she would be able to drive out of the space tomorrow!)  On one of our walks, we ate at a small trattoria in the port area, a local favorite, where she finally exercised a modicum of self-control and ordered just one dish and a salad rather than the whole menu of antipasti-primi piatti-secondi piatti-dessert.

Her choice, grilled squid, both looked and tasted great.  The green salad was not so great (iceberg lettuce), but the squid was enough on its own.  Craig also enjoyed a great meal with a “mixed fruits of the sea” antipasti, snapper ravioli and green salad.  Afterwards, we took a brisk walk up seemingly endless steps from the port to the central plaza on the corso and thence back to the B&B, with virtually the entire downtown to ourselves.  This lack of crowds is a recurring theme, possibly explained by the fact that the evening was quite chilly, with a sharp wind off the water, probably keeping the more savvy locals inside.