How Was Agrigento Built

Everything ancient at Agrigento is made of the ridge it stands on, and what survives survives for specific, traceable reasons.

Quarried in place

The temples are built of the local calcarenite, dug from the ridge itself. It is coarse and full of shell fragments, nothing like marble, so the Greeks rendered the finished buildings in fine white stucco to imitate the real thing. Traces of it survive in sheltered corners.

Why Concordia stands

The Temple of Concordia is nearly intact because in the late sixth century AD it was turned into a Christian church: the spaces between the outer columns were walled up, twelve arches were cut through the walls of the inner chamber, and the building was maintained and used for the next twelve hundred years. Its neighbours, left alone, fell down.

The temple that failed

The Temple of Olympian Zeus was the largest Doric temple ever begun, about 112 by 56 metres. It was too big for ordinary construction: instead of free-standing columns it used half-columns engaged in a continuous wall, with telamons — carved male figures nearly eight metres tall — standing in the upper order. It was never finished, it collapsed, and in the eighteenth century much of it was carted off to build the harbour mole at Porto Empedocle. One telamon is reassembled in the museum.

The city below

Under the temples the regular grid of the Hellenistic and Roman town survives, with excavated streets and blocks, and all around it tombs cut into the faces of the rock.

A reconstruction, openly

The four linked columns of the Temple of the Dioscuri, the image on every postcard of the site, were put up in 1836 out of pieces gathered from several different buildings. They are a nineteenth-century composition, and the park says so.