Agrigentum - Valley of the Temples

The reason to visit Agrigento is to visit the so-called Valley of the Temples, a spectacular archaeological site marked by some well preserved temples. The best preserved, as usual, were ones adapted to be come christian churches , as otherwise the early Christians would just use the ancient sites as quarries for building materials.

As we were walking there from our apartment we found an earlier entrance rather than hitting the main coach park. And although it was an entrance, the woman there fiercely indicated that you can't buy tickets there. But you could at the archaeological museum across the road. Which we duly did. And returned to the fierce woman with our tickets. As far as we could see this woman's main job was to tell people they couldn't buy tickets. I suppose they never thought that a more useful role for her would be to actually sell tickets?

Anyway, this part of the site was where they had excavated houses rather than temples. While there were sign boards, what the place lacked was something clearly showing what any of the hoses were supposed to look like. Generally we found that signage seemed to have been written by archaeologists for archaeologists, not for the visitor. They absolutely delighted in using technical terms and words that are never used in common parlance

Some of the houses had (partially) in tact mosaics

This was a shop. The depressions are bowls that would have contained whatever foodstuffs were being sold, presumably liquids like olive oil

The great joy of this section of the site was that there were no coach trippers. We had it largely to ourselves to explore. Then we just had to do the longish walk to the temples on the brow of the hill. Where the trippers really congregate

The majestic Temple of Concord

Temple of Juno

Somewhat incongruously in one of the buildings in the Valley there was an art exhibition. Obviously I went in for a peek

Temple of Hercules

One of the telemons, statues that would have held up/stood against the inner wall of the temple

Temple of the Dioscuri

Anther telemon, reconstructed and now vertical to show what it would have done

This was the entrance to the gymnasium. Or rather it was an 18th century fountain constructed out of ancient blocks found in the vicinity

Its really hard to make out anything of the gymnasium from the remains

Finally we circled back to the museum, where we had bought the entrance tickets

An ancient bath tub!

One of the telemons, life size in the museum, giving some idea of the scale of the temple

These were theatre seats

Cork model of the temple. You can see where the giant telemon statues would have fitted, covering only half the height of the temple roof

Some reconstructed painted walls of the houses we had seen at the beginning of the day

Outside of the museum is the Ekkleiasterion, effectively the parliamentary debating chamber

And then a Roman temple after all those Greek ones