This is the Temple of Hercules – one of five major temples constructed here in Agrigento by the Greeks in the 4th-6th centuries B.C.  We climbed all over it during our visit to the  Valley of the Temples, an archaeological park that is still being excavated.  Two other temples are in much better shape, but here’s the truly sad part: most of them were destroyed not by the Romans or the Carthaginians, who took turns conquering and enslaving the population, not by earthquakes, which did some damage, but by the early Christians, who viewed the massive temples as a rock quarry and carted them off to build churches.  The Temple of Zeus, which would have been the largest Greek temple ever constructed (it was never completed), the size of several football fields, has been reduced to a pile of rubble, and only one of the dozens of  “Telemone” – giant stone sculptures of men holding up the temple – was able to be pieced together (we saw it at the museum).  We’ve added more photos of this incredible park to our photo album (link in the previous posting).



Agrigento is a strange place.  At the top of the hill is a modern city with tall apartment buildings, mixed in among some medieval churches.  A few miles south, on a plateau, is the so-called “Valley” of the Temples.  And then a few more miles south, where we are staying, is a rather down-in-the-heels beach resort.  You really need a car to get around here, and our patience with buses is wearing thin after waiting more than an hour for a bus that never came to take us back from the Valley of the Temples.  (Actually, we now realize that when he let us off, the bus driver must have been trying to tell us something like: you have to take a different bus into town before you can get the same bus back to where you started!)



If any of you are thinking you might want to come here, all we can say is: do it now!  First of all, the weather – it’s hot, hot, hot climbing in and around these temples and it’s only the beginning of March! (It does cool off quite a bit at night, into the 50s.) It must be stifling in the summer – we’re told over 110 degrees.  Second, you need to be young and in good shape – unlike in the U.S., where you can’t touch anything and fear of lawsuits governs all human behavior, here they let you clamber all over the ruins.  (We actually ate our appropriate lunch of dates and almonds while sitting on the ruins of the Temple of Hercules.)  This is also a great time of year to come because there are no crowds and prices are lower.



Our hotel is quite a hoot.  It seems to be a family business – father, son, daughter-in-law running the whole show, from front desk to cooking dinner to cleaning the rooms, even though this is not a small place.  But there don’t seem to be many guests – we’ve only seen two others.  The owners prevailed upon us to try eating dinner here in the hotel, which we did, and found ourselves the only couple sitting in this enormous room full of tables set for people who never come.  We had no idea they were all waiting for us to come down and eat so they could close up the kitchen and go to bed!