Driving in Sicily for sure is different on a working day: it took me 3 hours to get from Noto to Agrigento, about 150 km. First, there were the hills around Ragusa, which steepness proved too much for the loaded trucks. And then came the rather hellish outskirts of Gela (an even earlier Greek settlement than Agrigento, how times have changed!), where every car just seemed to want to park on the other side of the street and where your eyes are blinded by a forest of screaming billboards. All this made me arrive in Agrigento around 11.30, not the best of times because of the sun and the scores of tour buses.

I started my sightseeing at the top, at the archeological museum. The museum is pleasant enough but specializes in vases a bit too much to my taste. The large Atlas statue however is definitely worth a look.

The ruins are situated downhill and split into two parts by a busy road. The best-preserved temple is the Temple of Concord, partly under scaffolding nowadays. The rest of the large grounds are scattered with stones, some forming sacrificial altars large enough to slaughter 100 oxen at one time.

All in all, I was a bit disappointed with Agrigento. Having seen already quite a number of Greek archeological remains, one gets a bit spoiled and these certainly aren't the best ones for a superficial visit. The site is applauded by ICOMOS as an authentic example of Greek colonization (and not Hellenistic from a later age). Personally, I was much more impressed by Paestum, also a former Greek colony on Italian soil.