Agrigento city break

Agrigento, the Sicilian Girgenti, is a town on the southern coast of Sicily, and capital of the province of Agrigento. It is renowned as the site of the ancient Greek city of Akragas, one of the leading cities of Magna Graecia during the golden age of Ancient Greece. Agrigento is a major tourist centre due to its extraordinarily rich archaeological legacy. It also serves as an agricultural centre for the surrounding region. Among its famous inhabitants Empedocles, the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher, was a citizen of ancient Agrigentum and Luigi Pirandello, dramatist and Nobel prize winner for literature.
A visit to Agrigento, which is among the most interesting Sicilian towns, takes about two days, to be divided up between a tour of the archeological zone and the monuments in the modern city. The city is just a few km from the sea.
Virgil, in Book III of the Aeneid, imagines that Aeneas, sailing along the southern coast of the island, saw the city towering proudly high over the plain: “Then steep Akragas displays from afar its lofty walls”. Remains of these walls can still be seen in various points – extended for a perimeter of 12 km.
The ancient city occupied a magnificent panoramic position on a high plateau which constituted the Acropolis. Felicitous ircumstances of time and place allowed the city to have an exceptionally prosperous development and the city presented itself with an air of magnificence. Thus Pindar in the 12th Pythian Ode sings of it in about 490BC as “the lover of splendor” the most beautiful city of mortal men”, the “site that was sacred to Persephone”, the goddess who with her mother Demeter was the object of intense veneration.
A walking tour of the Acropolis takes about 2 hours, visiting the remains of the Temples of Demeter, the Temple of Juno, the Temple of Concord, one of the best preserved Doric Temples in all Greek world, the Temple of Herakles, the Tomb of Theron, the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the Temple of the Chthonian or Earth Gods (Demeter and Persephone) which is by far the best known of all the Temples of Agrigento.
Don’t forget to visit the Regional Archeological Museum with remains of pre-Greek, Greek and Roman times.The modern city shows a beautiful Cathedral founded in the 11th c. a.C nad the Church of Santo Spirito, he most notable monument of Mediaeval Agrigento.