13. Agrigento, Caltagirone and Ragusa

Monday, Oct 21st.  This morning after breakfast we all piled onto the bus to go to Agrigento.  This city is renowned as the location of the ancient Greek city of Akragas.  The city was founded around 580 BC by Greek colonists from Gela.  It prospered and became one of the richest and most famous of the Greek colonies in Magna Graecia under the sixth-century tyrants Phalaris and Theron and became a democracy when Theron's son was overthrown.  The democracy was overthrown in 406 BC when it was sacked by the Carthaginians.  The city was disputed between the Romans and the Carthaginians during the First Punic War. The Romans laid siege to the city in 262 BC and captured it after defeating a Carthaginian relief force in 261 BC and sold the population into slavery. Although the Carthaginians recaptured the city in 255 BC the final peace settlement gave Sicily to Rome. It suffered badly during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) when both Rome and Carthage fought to control it. The Romans eventually captured Akragas in 210 BC and renamed it Agrigentum, although it remained a largely Greek-speaking community for centuries thereafter.  After the fall of the Roman Empire, the city passed into the hands of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy and then the Byzantine Empire. In 828 AD the Saracens captured the city.  Agrigento was captured by the Normans under Count Roger I in 1087, who established a Latin bishopric there.

On the way from Sciacca to Agrigento we passed a lot of interesting scenery.  Much of the landscape was rocky and not well suited for farming as in this photo.

This looks almost looks like a photo of a small town but it's not.  It's a cemetery.  The Sicilians believe in family crypts and so this cemetery is built that way.  Each family crypt will have a number of burial niches for family members.  When the niches get full, they take the oldest remains and move them to a common area within the crypt to free a niche up for the new burial.

The country has been invaded and raided so much over history that the tendency is for all town to be built on the top of a hill as can be seen in this photo.

We spent a lot of time touring old baroque churches but they do have new modern ones as can be seen in this photo.

We've arrived at Agrigento and once again you can see that it is built on top of a hill for defensive purposes.  However, we are not going into the town but to the Greek ruins which are where the town used to be before the Arabs started invading.

What we will be visiting is the "Valley of the Temples" which is a misnomer as it is actually ridge rather then a valley.  This compromises a large sacred area south of the city where seven monumental Greek temples in the Doric style were constructed during the 6th and 5th centuries BC.  Now excavated and partly restored, they constitute the largest and best-preserved ancient Greek buildings outside of Greece itself.  The first temple is the Temple of Juno that was built in the 5th-century BC and burned by the Carthaginians in 406 BC.  It was usually used for the celebrations of weddings.  Here are a couple of photos of this temple.

Greek temples were not used the way we use churches and temples today.  The sacrificial altar was outside the temple in front of the entrance (the front of the temple always faced east) and the only people who went into the temple were the priests.  The sacrificial animals (bulls typically) would be killed on the altar and the meat would be divided up between the people, the priests and the gods.  The temples and the altars were made out of limestone as you can see from the evidence of this sea shell embedded in the limestone of the altar out in front of the temple.

The view from the temple site was great, that is the Mediterranean Sea and if your eyes were good enough and it was clear enough you could see Africa.

As we walked down the ridge there were the remains of the old defensive walls along the edge of the ridge.  Some were natural stone formations and others were built up. The hemispherical holes in the walls are burial niches that early Christians dug into the walls to bury their dead.  Some of them as you can see in the second photo were fairly big.  They refer to this large one as a family niche.

We next came to this olive tree which has been dated as being over 1,000 years old.

The next temple we came to is the best preserved and is the called the Temple of Concordia.  That name comes from a Roman inscription that was found at the site.  No one knows what the original Greek name for this temple was.  It is the best preserved as it was turned into a Catholic church in the 6th-century AD.  These next two photos show the east and west ends of the temple.

Our guide pointed out that the columns on the front and rear of the temple look vertical but they are not.  The Greeks understood perspective and gave a slight taper to the design so that it would look straight to the human eye.  The typical design of these temples consisted of 6 columns across the front, 13 columns down the sides and an interior room with solid walls as in this sketch.

When they changed it over to a church they cut arches through the interior walls as can be seen in my second photo and erected filler walls between the exterior columns to enclose the church.  These filler walls were removed during the restoration but the arch openings are still there.

The next thing we came across was some old Christian catacombs that had been dug under the grounds but are now exposed.

Next was the remains of the Temple of Heracles which today consists of eight columns only.

It is amazing that any of these temples are standing as the Greeks didn't use mortar to hold the pieces together.  The columns are made from stacked disks.  To keep them aligned they chiseled square holes in each disk and then inserted a key.  Here is a photo of some of these disks and you can see the square key holes.

To raise the blocks to the tops of the columns, they used tripods with ropes.  They cut notches into the ends of the blocks for these ropes.  In this photo you can see a couple of these blocks with the rope notches.

Finally we came to the largest of the temples appropriately dedicated to Zeus.  Unfortunately, other then a few columns and piles of rubble there is not much to see of the temple as you can see in the next two photos.

One of the problems that the archaeologists have in trying to restore these temples is that the local people found that the ruins of these temples were a great source of building material for new construction.  Time and again as we visited these ruins that was a common problem and it made restoration very difficult if not impossible.

One of the things that was unique to this Temple of Zeus was the statues of giants that, along with the columns, held up the roof of the temple.  Here is a photo of a partially restored statue lying on the ground.

After lunch we headed to the hilltop town of Caltagirone.  The name of this town comes from the Arabic "qal'at-al-jarar" and roughly means castle of pottery jars.  The residents of Caltagirone have been making pottery from at least the 2nd-century BC and that is why we are visiting here to learn about ceramics and maybe buy a souvenir.  Here we are with our local guide in the ceramics shop of Francesco Navanzino and Sons with samples of their ceramics.

We then went on a tour of the Shops where they make the pottery.  Here is one of the brothers painting a pitcher prior to it being fired in the kilns.

Next we had a demonstration of how they use a pottery wheel to make a vase.  You can link to the video by clicking on this image.

The narration is being translated by our tour guide.  This again is one of the brothers and at the end he cut the vase in half so we could see what the inside looked like.

After this we headed to the town of Ragusa where we will spend the night at the Poggio del Sole resort.  However, along the way we came across a number of German pillboxes left over from WW II.  Here is a photo of one.

The area around Ragusa is famous for the walls that separate farmers fields as they are built without mortar or concrete and really look neat as you can see in this photo.