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Few places in the Mediterranean carry the weight of Agrigento quite so visibly. Perched on a ridge in Sicily's southern interior, the city looks out over a long slope of almond and olive groves that descends towards the sea, and it is along that slope that one of the ancient world's most extraordinary concentrations of Greek temples has stood for more than two and a half millennia. Agrigento was founded as Akragas around 580 BC by Greek colonists from Gela, and within two centuries it had grown into one of the wealthiest and most populous cities in the entire Greek world. The philosopher Empedocles was born here. The tyrant Theron built temples that still define the skyline. That history is not merely background; it is the reason most visitors come at all.

The Valley of the Temples is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and the centrepiece of any time spent in Agrigento, though calling it a valley is something of a misnomer. The temples are arranged along a limestone ridge south of the modern city, and the scale of what survives is genuinely arresting. The Temple of Concordia is among the best-preserved Doric temples anywhere in the world, its columns intact and its form immediately legible as a building rather than a ruin. The Temple of Juno stands at the eastern end of the ridge, slightly more weathered, with a long altar forecourt and views across open countryside. The Temple of Heracles, older than both, retains only eight columns, but their honey-coloured stone against a clear Sicilian sky has a particular quality that photographs rarely capture accurately.