Agrigento, Sicily
Our visits today to the beautiful Greek temple complex known as the Valley of the Temples, to the remarkably intact Greek city site of Selinunte, and to the nearby modern Sicilian city of Agrigento offered us beautiful scenes at every scale, led us into the distant past and made for a day of wonderful breadth and depth.
Millennia seemed to vanish away like a morning fog in the spring sunshine as we strolled among the ruins. Climbing the pediments, gazing up at the perfectly proportioned columns, and discovering marvelous details like little mosaics and even a small marble bathtub, we found the lives of artists, philosophers and laborers who had lived thousands of years ago opening to our scrutiny as though they stood beside us.
Deep past was constantly juxtaposed with the present. An exhibit of modern sculpture created an arresting, intriguing contrast with the pitted, ages-old sandstone of the Concordia Temple. Delicious meals and snacks of olives, seafood, espresso and gelato snapped our senses into the present while echoing the experiences of gourmets through the centuries. We walked along one street where wealthy Greek merchants and Carthaginian traders had enjoyed the life of luxury that Plato referred as “the Sicilian way,” and we shopped for wine and elegant shoes and handicrafts along another street where Sicilians of today follow the same path.
Space as well as time seemed to open for us today. Wildflowers were everywhere, tiny blossoms pushing up from beneath multi-ton stone columns and fields of color leading our eyes out across the hills above the sea. Bright green lizards zipped over the tawny rock of the monumental city walls and stopped to bask for a moment in the bright sunshine. Bees hovered over blooming bushes and beetles trekked across the landscape of a single blossom. From the minute to the monolithic and from the present instant deep into antiquity, everyone and everything seemed to be enjoying a perfect spring day in Sicily.
