Every year in July in Agrigento the Feast of San Calogero is celebrated. It is said that the monk Calogerus came to Sicily to spread the Christian faith and that during a period of plague, he walked the streets to ask for bread for the poor. Fearful that he would get too close to their houses, cit...

The peristasis, from the Greek for "enclosure", is a porticoed colonnade, mostly quadrangular in shape, surrounding the temple's shrine....

According to the ancient Greeks, the kingdom of the underworld was where the souls of the dead resided. The kingdom was usually located underground and to get there souls had to cross the river Acheron on a boat ferried by the ancient Charon. To pay for the journey, an obolus, a coin of little va...

Aeschylus was a Greek poet and playwright who was born in 525 BC to an aristocratic family from Eleusis. After moving to Athens to try his hand at dramatic agonies, he lived for a period in Sicily, at the court of his patron, tyrant Hiero I of Syracuse. It is likely that during his stay in Sicily, ...

The almond tree is a very long-lived and widespread tree in the Mediterranean Basin. It can reach a height of 10 metres and is usually easy to recognise in a garden. Its splendid flowering of pinkish-white shoots, which in Agrigento starts as early as January, makes it one of the garden's most bea...

The illustrious Syracusan novelist Elio Vittorini was inspired throughout his life by the places of his birthplace, which became a sort of sentimental route even within his novels. In fact, the Sicilian writer always wandered between two places in Via Minerva: the more frequented Minerva bar and th...

The Agrigento Warrior is a wonderful example of Greek sculpture, whose style is defined as "severe" due to the rigidity of expression and movement of the statue compared to the following classical period. The work, created around 480-475 BC, was found in the 1940s with the torso lying near the Temp...

In his 1980 Viaggi e scritti letterari (Travels and Literary Writings), Cesare Brandi dedicates a chapter to Pantalica entitled "Quella fata Morgana chiamata Pantalica" (The Fata Morgana named Pantalica), in which he gives an evocative account of his journey through the Anapo valley, discovering a s...

The first Christian tombs were extremely simple and poor. Following Christ's example, corpses were wrapped in a sheet with no coffin. Different types of tombs can be found in the catacomb of San Giovanni. The tuff walls were dug into for loculi, rectangular niches enclosed by tiles, marble slabs o...

The Italian Environment Fund (Fondo Ambiente Italiano – FAI) is a foundation that, since its creation in 1975, has protected and developed Italian historical, artistic and landscape heritage. Through the organisation of initiatives and events such as the FAI Days in spring and autumn, the founda...