Italian Road Trip Part Two - Agrigento and Mt. Etna, Sicily

This was our second day in Sicily. We decided to drive to the other side of the island to visit the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento - basically this place with lots of Greek temples! I confess I am magnificently ignorant about history of all kinds including Greek so this is not going to be a greatly intellectual post.


The inland parts of Sicily are quite barren but spectacular none the less. I particularly liked what they'd done with the road here - nice bend. There was also a great hilltop village that you could see from the road - I think it was Eze. There were a lot of vineyards and olive groves etc. It was damn hot in the car but it was NOTHING compared to what we were coming up to, though we didn't realise that yet of course.

Here's our little car in the little car park. The toilets here had a sign outside saying "free toilets" in various languages but then inside was some guy with a plate for your euros. I'm pretty sure he was just figured it was a good place to sit and earn some cash.

Ok so we started to walk around. Problem number 1 - It was REALLY hot. There was very little shade as you can see and it just felt like being in a great big oven... albeit on a low setting. People pretty much moved from one bit of shade to another. Brilliantly we were also visiting in the very hottest part of the day - pretty soon I began to understand why they run guided tours in the evening!
Here's me demonstrating problem number 2 - none of the signs were in English! Not knowing what the hell stuff is about is a perennial problem when travelling to non-English speaking countries where you don't know the language.

Given me and Mr JRB's mutual ignorance of this Greek stuff we resorted to trying to figure out what this was all about by reading the guide book. Sadly I had only brought my "Italy" guidebook and as you'll be able to gather by the size of the thing it doesn't go into a great amount of detail on any particular place! Note to self - do not in the future buy small guidebooks on big places.
Some parts were more ruinous than others - this being one of them. Still amazing though. It's a shame that a bunch of Christians went on a bit of a wrecking mission here - I think that's what the guidebook said happened anyway. Apparently they mistakenly thought that these were Pagan temples and they went nuts! I'm surprised they could be bothered to do all of this in this heat - I'm guessing it must have been a particularly cold winter. They probably spread the job over a number of years.
Here's one big mutha of a stone lady. I know how she feels... well the big part anyway not the stone part.
Problem number 3 - I wholly underestimated how hard it would be to walk around this place in this damn heat! The entire thing was only something like 3 miles but it felt like 5 times that distance. This photo looks pretty innocent but my God was I hurting at this point. There was this great long walk with no shade and it was the middle of the day and was probably pushing 40 degrees C.
Amazing temples. Apparently this very well preserved one survived the angry Christians' wrath because they decided it would make a nice church.


Here's me at the furthest distance we got from the car. I didn't even bother to find any shade to sit in. I was feeling glad that we'd made it but so wiped out and just soooo hot.

The long road back to the car - and you can only see as far as a bend in the road in this photo! The Italians weren't suffering like I was... in fact, no one was suffering like I was. Why?

I like this photo. This is the same well preserved temple as before but from a different angle, taken on the walk back.

We got back to the car and headed into the small shop to buy some water. Just as I was feeling relieved that I'd survived, I nearly passed out for the second time in two days. I felt awful but we managed to make it across to the car where I sat with my head between my legs sipping water. The car must have been about 50 degrees C! It took some time but I gradually felt better. As before I'm not sure what this was but I'm guessing some kind of heat stroke.

Here's the final route. I can't say I enjoyed it at the time but I'm glad I did it and at least there was nice stuff to look at while I felt like crap!


On the drive back to the hotel we took the guidebook's "scenic" drive past Mount Etna. This part of it was very scenic but the rest of it was really grotty and a bit scary. Mount Etna was beautiful though. We had planned to get a bit closer but we were too tired by this point.

I love this! They let their cows just walk all over the road round here! There were signs to warn you of cows on the road but I didn't think there'd actually be any. They didn't give two moos about the car, they just kept strolling along to wherever they were going. Please moove out of the way... groan.

Finally we wound up the day with a meal in this nice trattoria in Taormina. Taormina is lovely at night - there's great little restaurants with tables outside like this filling the narrow roads. We picked up a couple of cannolis on the way home from this great little shop called Roberto's. Droool... mmmm cannoli.