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girgenti tempio dei dioscuri

Girgenti nell’opera “The picturesque Mediterranean, its cities, shores, and islands” di J. MacWhirter

6 Agosto 2022 //  by Elio Di Bella

 

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.  

Categoria: Storia AgrigentoTag: agrigento, agrigento racconta, agrigento storia, akragas, girgenti, sicilia, valle dei templi

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