Agrigento historical timeline

Agrigento was Akragas, and for roughly two centuries it was among the largest and wealthiest cities anywhere in the Greek world.

Akragas

Colonists from Gela, further along the same coast, founded the city around 580 BC. It grew very fast on grain, olives and trade with Carthage. Its first ruler of note, Phalaris, left a reputation for cruelty attached to a hollow bronze bull in which he was said to have roasted his enemies — a story the Greeks repeated for centuries, true or not.

The temple century

Under Theron, Akragas and Syracuse together beat Carthage at Himera in 480 BC, and the prisoners taken there supplied the labour that built the temples. The poet Pindar, who knew the city, called it the most beautiful of mortal cities. The philosopher Empedocles was born here around 490 BC.

Destruction

In 406 BC Carthage returned, besieged the city for eight months and sacked it. Akragas never recovered its position. It passed to Rome as Agrigentum in 210 BC, to the Arabs as Kerkent in the ninth century, and to the Normans after them; by then the population had withdrawn up the hill to the defensible town, called Girgenti, which kept that name until 1927.

1943

The Allied landings of July 1943 came ashore along this coast, in the American sector, and Agrigento and Porto Empedocle were taken in the week after the first beaches.

Modern

Sulphur mining and then mass emigration shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1966 a landslide destroyed a swathe of the modern town and set off a national argument about unregulated building that has followed the city ever since. The Valley of the Temples was inscribed by UNESCO in 1997.