Grande Grecia

Agrigento is primarily known for a single big tourist attraction, which I'll talk about momentarily.  But the town itself was actually very nice as well.

I went for a wander in the early evening post-sightseeing and discovered that it's almost the Platonic Italian hill town, with lots of barrow little alleys, small churches around every corner and everything from early Romanesque to Renaissance to modern architecture (of particular note was an 11th century church that was built on top of an ancient Greek temple!)

It was also interesting that the town obviously had a healthy and hefty tourist industry, with lots of charming guesthouses and shops selling Sicilian pottery and other souvenirs.  We'd seen some evidence of this at the big archaeological site outside of town, but until I tooky evening stroll I'd figured that everyone came on daytrips and never really visited the town proper.

Doubtless this is actually what many people did, skipping the 3km walk we took down from the hilltop setting of the town to the low ridge paralleling the shore of the Mediterranean a kilometre away.  Atop this ridge was the (completely inaccurately named) Valley (I just said it was on a ridgetop, right!?) of the temples.

The valley/ridge is home to a half dozen ancient Greek temples in varying states of repair.  Being in Italy you might expect all the classical archaeological sites to be of Roman origin, but in fact Sicily and other parts of southern ltaly were amongst the first and most prosperous parts of Magna Grecia, "Greater Greece", Greek colonies around the Mediterranean whose settlement coincided roughly with the rise of the Roman empire.

Having just been in Tunisia where even really fabulous sights/sites like Dougga were largely empty, it came as a bit of a shock to see the crowds milling about at the entrance (and an entry fee that was double digit New Zealand dollars).  The temples were pretty impressive, the day was gorgeous and though the site was busy, it was over a kilometre long, and most of our fellow visitors were in large groups, so we were often more or less alone with the temples.

We departed Agrigento by bus before transferring to the cutest little single-car diesel train that was almost like a little bus on rails.  We rattled our way through the countryside and up into the hills in the island's centre.

We planned for a stopover in the little town of Ragusa, famous for its Renaissance architecture.  We got off the train and walked to the cathedral, supposedly at the heart of the most beautiful part of the town, and were a little underwhelmed.  I mean the place was pleasant enough, but I really couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

It took us a little while to realize that Ragusa consisted of two towns, the upper and the lower, which had originally been separate municipalities, each with it's own cathedral.  Once we'd found our way to the lower town we had just enough time to descend the several hundred stairs to it and have a quick tour around before going back to the station to catch the next train to the city of Syracuse.  We redid the journey down to the lower town (and below) by rail. The tracks were a pretty spectacular piece of engineering, needing a couple of long, sweeping switchbacks and a spiral tunnel to take us down to the river valley below Ragusa.

Syracuse/Siracusa was probably the grandest city in all of Magna Grecia, and often the source of argument and trouble for the Romans, never being quite sure whether they wanted to be allied with/ruled over by the Republic or not.  It was also the home of Archimedes, and the site of his famous "Eureka!" moment when he leapt out of the bath on figuring out the basic principle of buoyancy.

Even after this time, it remained a vibrant trade centre and the island of Ortigia is jam packed with Baroque churches and residences.  We spent two nights in Siracusa, but only one day. We were torn about whether to spend it in the the Baroque island or the archaeological site, especially as the annual performances of Classical Greek theatre were on at the latter.  But the ticket prices would have (literally) coat more than our entire daily budget and as the performances are in Greek with Italian translation, probably would have largely been lost on us. So we spent our day in Siracusa circumambulating the island's perimeter, then ducking inside to explore the churches and piazzas, and to have a picnic of fresh crescent shaped Sicilian bread and produce.  This was reprised in the late afternoon at the Rocky beach near our Airbnb on the mainland, where we joined the day's few remaining sunbathers and added a bottle of Sicilian red wine to our feast.

While in Siracusa we also had a couple of other important Italian culinary expetiences: the only pasta we ate while in Italy, Pennette ala Normana, a super Sicilian dish of small tube pasta topped with fried tomato, eggplant and grated, salted Ricotta cheese.  It's very rich and a little goes a long way! We also had our only gelato in Italy, mulberry flavour, as it was an unusual one and they seemed to be in season judging by the sticky purple footpaths we saw around.

We departed Siracusa by train for Sicily's second city, Catania, which sits about halfway up its east coast, towered over by Mount Etna.  Rest assured that there we'll have more food stories and a few unexpected adventures to tell you about!