Agrigento Events

Two events dominate the Agrigento calendar, and both are genuinely local rather than staged for visitors.

Sagra del Mandorlo in Fiore

The almond blossom festival runs for about a week in the first half of February, timed to the flowering of the almond trees that grow among the temples. It dates from the 1930s and is held jointly with an international folklore festival, so groups of musicians and dancers from a long list of countries parade through the town and perform inside the archaeological park, alongside the painted Sicilian carts. It ends with a torch lit in front of the Temple of Concordia. It is the one week of the year when the site and the town are doing the same thing.

Feast of San Calogero

The city's patron is celebrated for a week from the first Sunday in July. The dark-skinned statue of the saint is carried through the streets by bearers who move at something close to a run, and people throw loaves of bread from balconies and windows to the crowd following it. It is loud, crowded and not remotely a performance. The bread is the point: Calogero is a plague saint, remembered for tending the sick, and the loaves recall the food left out for him while he did it.

Summer at the temples

The park opens into the evening through the summer with the temples floodlit, and the ridge is used for concerts and for open-air theatre, Pirandello included. Buying for the evening slot rather than the afternoon one is the single best decision a visitor makes in July or August.

Easter and Christmas

Holy Week brings processions through the upper town, and in December nativity scenes are staged among the ruins in the Valley, which is the one time of year the site is busy in winter.