Girgenti, the City of Temples, the richest of all places in the world save one
in monuments of Pagan worship, conceals its character effectually enough from him
who enters it from the north. AVithin the precincts of the existing city there is
little sign to be seen of its archaeological treasures, and, to tell the truth, it has
but few attractions of its own. Agrigentum, according to Pindar “the most beautiful
city of mortals,” will not so strike a modern beholder; but that, no doubt, is because,
like Syracuse and other famous seats of ancient art and religious reverence, it has
shrunk to dimensions so contracted as to leave all the riches of those stately
edifices to which it owed the fame of its beauty far outside its present boundaries.
Nothing, therefore, need detain the traveller in the town itself (unless, indeed, he would snatch ;i brief visit to the later-built cathedral, remarkable for nothing but the
famous marble sarcophagus with its relief of the Myth of Hippolytus), and he will do
well to mount the Kupe Atenea without delay. The view, however, in every direction
is magnificent, the town to the right of the spectator and behind him, the sea in
front, and the rolling, ruin-dotted plain between. From this point Girgenti itself
looks imposing enough with the irregular masses of its roofs and towers silhouetted
against the sky. But it is the seaward view which arrests and detains the eye. Hill
summit or hotel window, it matters little what or where your point of observation is,
you have but to look from the environs of (lirgenti towards Porto Empedocle, a few
miles to the south, and you bring within yoiu field of vision a space of a few dozen
acres in extent which one may reasonably suppose to have no counterpart in any area
of like dimensions on the face of the globe. It is a garden of mouldering shrines,
a positive orchard of shattered porticoes and broken column-shafts, and huge pillars
prostrate at the foot of their enormous plinths. You can count and identify and
name them all even from where you stand. Ceres and Proserpine, Juno Lacinia,
Concord, Hercules, /Esculapius, Jupiter Olympius, Castor and Pollux, all are visible
at once, all recognisable and numerable from east to w r est in their order as
above. It is a land of ruined temples, and, to all appearance, of nothing else.
One can just succeed, indeed, in tracing the coils of the railway as it winds like
a black snake towards Porto Empedocle, but save that there are no signs of life.
One descries no waggon upon the roads, no horse in the furrows, no labourer
among the vines. Girgenti itself, with its hum and clatter, lies behind you;
no glimpse of life or motion is visible on the quays of the port. All seems as
desolate as those grey and mouldering fanes of the discrowned gods, a solitude which only changes in character without deepening in intensity as the eye travels
across the foam-fringed coast-line out on the sailless sea. There is a strange
beauty in this silent Pantheon of dead deities, this landscape which might almost
seem to he still echoing the last wail of the dying Pan ; and it is a beauty of
death and desolation to which the life of nature, here especially abounding,
contributes not a little by contrast. For nowhere in Sicily is the country-side
more lavishly enriched by the olive. Its contorted stem and quivering, silvery
foliage are everywhere. Olives climb the hill-slopes in straggling files ; olives cluster
in twos and threes and larger groups upon the level plain ; olives trace themselves
against the broken walls of the temples, and one catches the flicker of their branches
in the sunlight that streams through the roofless peristyles. From llupe Atenea
out across the plain to where the eye lights upon the white loops of the road to
Porto Empedocle one might almost say that every object which is not a temple
or a fragment of a temple is an olive tree.
By far the most interesting of the ruins from the archaeologist’s point of view
is that of the Temple of Concord, which, indeed, is one of the best-preserved in
existence, thanks, curiously enough, to the religious Philistinism which in the
Middle Ages converted it into a Christian church. It was .certainly not in the
spirit of its tutelary goddess that it was so transformed : nothing, no doubt, was
farther from the thoughts of those who thus appropriated the shrine of Concord than
to illustrate the doctrine of the unity of religion. But art and archaeology, if not romance, have good reason to thank them that they “took over” the building on any
grounds, for it is, of course, to this circumstance that we owe ‘its perfect condition
of preservation, and the fact that all the details of the Doric style as applied
to religious architecture can he studied in this temple while so much of so many
of its companion fanes has crumbled into indistinguishable ruin. Concordia has
remained virtually intact through long centuries under the homely title of “the Church
of St. Gregory of the Turnips,” and it real’s its stately facade before the spectator
in consequence with architrave complete, a magnificent hexastyle of thirty-four
columns, its lateral files of thirteen shafts apiece receding in noble lines of perspective.
Juno Laciuia, or Juno Luciuda (for it may have been either as the ” Lacinian
Goddess ” or as the Goddess of Childbed that Juno was worshipped here), an older
fane than Concordia, though the style had not yet entered on its decline when the
latter temple was built, is to be seen hard by, a majestic and touching ruin. It dates
from the fifth century B.C., and is therefore Doric of the best period. Earthquakes,
it seems, have co-operated with time in the work of destruction, and though twenty-five
whole pillars are left standing, the facade, alas ! is represented only by a fragment of
architrave. More extensive still have been the ravages inflicted on the Temple of
Hercules by his one unconquerable foe. This great and famous shrine, much
venerated of old by the Agrigentines, and containing that statue of the god which the
indefatigable “collector” Verres vainly endeavoured to loot, is now little more than a
heap of tumbled masonry, with one broken column-shaft alone still standing at one
extremity of its site. But it is among the remains of the ancient sanctuary of Zeus,
all unfinished though that edifice was left by its too ambitious designers, that we
get the best idea of the stupendous scale on which those old-world religious architects
and masons worked. The ruin itself has suffered cruelly from the hand of man ; so
much so, indeed, that little more than the ground plan of the temple is to be traced
by the lines of column bases, vast masses of its stone having been removed from its
site to be used in the construction of the Mole. But enough remains to show the
gigantic scale on which the work was planned and partially carried out. The pillars
which once stood upon those bases were twenty feet in circumference, or more than
two yards in diameter, and each of their flutings forms a niche big enough to contain
a man ! Yon Caryatid, who has been carefully and skilfully pieced together from
the fragments doubtless of many Caryatids, and who now lies, hands under head,
supine and staring at the blue sky above him, is more than four times the average
height of an English lifeguardsmau. From the crown of his bowed Lead to his stony
soles he measures all twenty-five feet, and to watch a tourist sitting by or on him
and gazing on Girgenti in the distance is to be visited by a touch of that feeling of
the irony of human things to which Shelley gives expression in his ” Ozymandias.”
The railway route from Girgenti to Palermo is less interesting than that from
Catania to Girgeuti. It runs pretty nearly due south and north across the island
from shore to shore, through a country mountainous indeed, as is Sicily everywhere,
but not marked by anything particularly striking in the way of highland scenery.
At Termini we strike the northern coast, and the line branches off to the west.
Another dozen miles or so brings us to Santa Flavia, whence it is but half an hour’s
walk to the ruins of Soluntum, situated on the easternmost hill of the promontory of
Catalfano. The coast-view from this point is striking, and on a clear day the
headland of Cefalu, some twenty miles away to the eastward, is plainly visible. Ten
more miles of “westing” and we approach Palermo, the Sicilian capital, a city
better entered from the sea, to which it owes its beauty as it does its name.
To the traveller fresh from Girgenti and its venerable ruins, or from Syracuse with
its classic charm, the first impressions of Palermo may very likely prove disappointing.
Especially will they be so if he has come with a mind full of historic enthusiasm
and a memory laden with the records of Greek colonisation, Saracen dominion, and
Norman conquest, and expecting to find himself face to face with the relics and
remainder of at any rate the modern period of the three.
Raffadali, arriva il primo trattore e cambia il lavoro nei campi