Agrigento Culture

For a town of this size Agrigento has produced an unusual amount, and its two big annual events both happen outdoors and in public.

Pirandello

Luigi Pirandello was born in 1867 at Caos, a farmhouse in the country just outside the town, and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. The house is a museum, and his ashes are buried under a pine on the ridge beside it, looking at the sea. His plays — Six Characters in Search of an Author above all — are staged in the Valley in summer.

Almond blossom

The Sagra del Mandorlo in Fiore fills the first half of February, when the almond trees among the temples flower. It has run since the 1930s and is paired with an international folklore festival, so the week brings costumed dance and music groups from a long list of countries into the archaeological park and the streets of the town.

San Calogero

The feast of San Calogero, the city's dark-skinned patron saint, runs for a week from the first Sunday of July. The statue is carried through the town at a near-run and bread is thrown from the balconies to the crowd below — a genuinely local occasion rather than a performance for visitors.

The town above

The upper town keeps a Norman cathedral dedicated to San Gerlando and, in a lane below it, the church of Santa Maria dei Greci, built directly on a fifth-century BC Doric temple whose column stumps are still visible along the flank. The regional archaeological museum, opened in the 1960s, is among the most important in Sicily.

Montalbano country

Andrea Camilleri was born down the road at Porto Empedocle, and the invented town of Vigàta in his detective novels is that port.