Just Passing Through: Day Trip to Temples of Agrigento

Sicily, while being the Mediterranean's largest island, is small enough that a person could drive around the entire thing in a day. We had planned to drive from Syracuse to Agrigento, rather, the tourist heavy Temples at Agrigento.

Agrigento itself is a large modern city, and on the outskirts is a 2 km long complex with three major temple sights and dozens of smaller pieces and former domiciles. 

On this sunny mid-morning-to-early-afternoon adventure, what I remember is the stifling heat, carrying Cassius most places, and us sweating each other out. He's a big boy, and this wasn't his most outgoing day on foot.

Corrie had him tied to her chest most of the days in Rome using our Ergo carrier, but it was lost on the train to Calabria or the apartment in Rome, and my turn had come to be on Cassius-duty.

Being assigned to Cass was great, but it meant plenty of corralling and carrying. And that whatever historical info about the site was lost on me.

The first temple, at the bottom of the site. It's the least restored/surviving of all of them:

I say "bottom" of the site because there are two entrances, one at the top, and one at the bottom. The bottom seems to be more of the main entrance, with a more accessible and bigger parking lot. The site slopes pretty steadily, and wherever you enter, you either have to walk up and then back down, or down and then back up. Unless of course you spring for the taxi, which of course we did not.

The second temple is in the best shape, and around the front (not in frame below) is a felled statue in also in rather good shape.

There were plenty of people inside, and it looked like we could have joined them, but they turned out to be workers, construction workers in the preservation department.

There's Agrigento proper in the distance. We had to return to find for wifi for a message (a post about communication is still coming).

At the last temple my phone was 1%. I was able to get a few pictures. I jumped up on a large rock and looked back at the middle temple, located below on the left, and the modern city of Agrigento off to the right. The composition is nice, if difficult to make out on the small view here:

This was the last picture my phone could pull off:

I'm not sure I got a picture of it, but the coastline was visible a few kilometers away. Corrie had wanted to get over to it to have a dip, feet or whole body, mostly because it was the third sea associated with Sicily. By the end of the walking it was also because it was hot as balls, but it never worked out.

Sicily is surrounded, technically in the local conceptions, by three separate seas: to the east is the Ionian Sea; to the north is the Tyrrheanean Sea, and to the west is either the Sicilian Sea or the Mediterranean Sea, depending on which local source you're looking at.

These three seas also correspond essentially to the of the triangular shape of the island.

Once finished with the site, and after some driving looking for wifi, we headed north to find our next base, the tiny mountain village of Collesano.