Agrigento

We took a day trip from Palermo to Agrigento, which turned out to be on the other side of Sicily. Who knew? I thought it was closer. (It is on the far southern side of the island.) But, it turned out to be a good thing that we went far away from Palermo that day because it poured there- but not a drop of rain in Agrigento.

The train ride was fantastic in and of itself. 2 hours (very enjoyable though) across the island. Landscape unlike anything I had ever seen before. The scenery changes so quickly- mountains, rolling hills, tree-covered landscape to completely barren. It was wild. Awesome that we got to see a little more of Sicily just on the train ride.


Agrigento is famous for it's very well preserved temples. All of this is left-overs from Greek civilization, but in Italy. That's one reason why I liked Sicily so much- there was so much overlap between Italian, Greek, and Arab cultures all over the place. Definitely a multi-cultural island.

This picture above shows the U shaped cuts in the sandstone that they used to hoist the blocks in place to build the temples (they used a series of pulleys and ropes through them to lift). Some of those U's were as big as me! They were all over the place.



Restoration of one of the collosal statues that used to be on the temple of Hercules here. I guess these huge guys were all around the temple. See if you can notice in some other pictures how their arms are positioned: up behind their heads as if they are holding up something. That was the point: they "held" up the temple. We saw this model of the temple in the museum and it was really quite impressive.



See how big they were??!! Chaz looks tiny compared to it. Now imagine a million of those surrounding the temple, holding it up. Impressive.


Biiiiiiiig agave plant. These were everywhere in Agrigento!




These temples looked different from any other had I have seen. They're made out of sandstone.


This cute dog followed us around the whole time :)



They had so many artifacts from this city! We unfortunately had to breeze through the museum because we had to catch a bus. But we saw some beautiful things.