Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, with a Pit Stop in Noto

Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples is the most amazing place you’ve never heard of. At least I had never heard of it, until I began planning a trip to Sicily a few months back.

Turns out Sicily’s south coast has an ancient Greek temple complex said to be the most outstanding outside the Acropolis in Athens (and unlike the Acropolis, it has the advantage of feeling undiscovered).

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But first came Noto, above, a half hour from Syracuse, a hill town of quiet (except for the church bells) Baroque beauty. For lack of time, we breezed in and out. Noto had to stand in for Modica and Ragusa, which are surely worth extended visits as well. Can’t do it all, I kept telling myself.

Noto’s long, elegant promenade, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, is centered on — guess what? — a grand and glorious Duomo, built or re-built, as were all the towns in the southeastern corner of Sicily, in the early 18th century following a devastating earthquake in the 1690s.

An hour’s stroll through Noto’s relatively un-touristed streets, a pistachio/almond granita in a café, a peek into a few of the town’s fifty antique churches, which were more restrained on the inside than their intricate stonework façades would suggest, and we were on our way again.

Choosing (blind) one of several routes suggested by the GPS, we ended up taking a three-hour drive to Agrigento, which encompassed everything from ugly urbanity (Gela, an industrial port) to heart-stopping beauty, deep in the countryside. There were fields of wildflowers, infinite sea views and agriculture on a grand scale — greenhouses filled with tomato plants, olive orchards, wine grapes reaching over the hills into the distance.

We arrived after dark at the Villa Goethe, below, in Agrigento’s historic center. The B&B is so named because the German poet actually stayed in the building in the 18th century as a guest of the then-owner, a baron.

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Though the old town has a bunch of highly rated restaurants one can’t possibly sample in a two-night stay, Agrigento draws visitors mostly for those 5th century B.C. temples, seven of them in total. Each was dedicated to a different god or goddess, not all known, but Zeus, Heracles and Juno (or Hera) were among them.

The temples are strung out along a mile-long walking path, interspersed with 500-year-old olive trees. They are in varying states of preservation, from barely to incredible. All have now been stabilized, a feat made possible in recent years with the help of EU funding. Needless to say, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site.

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Visitors are now able to scramble over most of the ruins, without a guard in sight, though not over the Temple of Concordia, the least ruined of them, above, which vies with Athens’ Parthenon in terms of preservation, scale and grandeur.

The bronze sculpture, below, depicting the fallen Icarus is a monumental contemporary work.

The Agrigento temples were built of an ochre-colored, locally quarried limestone, not the white marble of the Parthenon. Otherwise, they’re architecturally similar.

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A couple of the temples are little more than fallen stones against the perfect Mediterranean sky, overrun in Sicily’s full-on spring with wildflowers of purple and yellow, rosemary and other fragrant herbs.

The Temple of Zeus was the largest of them, once held up by telamon, or figures that are the male equivalent of the caryatids of the Acropolis. One — at least 30 feet high — remains at the site, below, lying horizontal on the ground.

Another is displayed at Agrigento’s extraordinary archaeological museum, an absolute must to round out an understanding of the temple sites and the culture that produced them.

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The museum has a vast collection of Greek Attic pottery from the area that the Met must surely covet. The scenes on the red-and-black vases, exquisitely etched and painted (and signed, often by both painter and potter) offer a trove of detailed information about life in that era.

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If all that’s not enough, the Valley of the Temples also contains a sunken garden of some 12 acres called Kolymbethra, below. It’s set in a deep pool, dug by Carthiginian prisoners of war in the 5th century BC, but later filled in and used for agriculture.

It’s now an Edenic citrus grove where we gorged once again on stolen fruit, from bitter citrons tasted and quickly thrown away to the sweetest blood tangerines.

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Rarely have I been so reluctant to end a vacation. A final day of roaming in Rome, mostly camera-free, was a nice and necessary buffer. We stayed at the faded grand dame Hotel Quirinale, enjoying its vintage cage elevator and Negronis in a 1950s ballroom-turned-guest-lounge.

We wandered the streets, checking on the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, Piazza Navona and other greatest hits, just to make sure they were still there (they were, and crawling with tourists). One highlight: an outdoor lunch of pasta with cheese, pepper and truffles at La Maretta, a restaurant in the Regola neighborhood where most of the patrons were actually speaking Italian.

Naples, Pizza and Pompeii

THE PIZZA. It really is that good. My cousin and I randomly entered one of many pizzerias near our hotel in Naples last night — here, they’re actual restaurants with a full menu and a wine list, not counters where you get a slice and a soda — and ordered a Margherita and another with provolone and basil. Best pizza of my life. It’s the water, they say, but it’s also the bufala mozzarella and the tomato sauce and the way they bake the crust, thin and crispy on the edges but chewy toward the center. We didn’t make a fetish over seeking out any particular place; Susan’s taxi driver had told her, “There’s no bad pizza in Naples,” and we took his word for it.

From our balcony at the Grand Hotel Saint Lucia, above, a grande dame perched on the Bay of Naples, the smell of the sea and the sound of the gulls is ever present. We can see Vesuvius to the left of us, shrouded in clouds, Castel dell’Ovo, below, a site with 2,000 years of history, straight ahead, and the city curving around to the right.

After Milan, Naples doesn’t seem particularly chaotic. Crowded, hectic, noisy, yes. Construction everywhere, yes. But mainly just full of life, as we discovered walking around today from the seaport area up through the center of town. We looked into churches and another Victorian iron-and-glass shopping center, Galleria Umberto; had a peek at Cafe Gambrinus where Oscar Wilde and other 19th c. notables hung out; stopped at the cafe/bookstore Intra Moenia on leafy Piazza Bellini for a glass of Prosecco.

Then we ran though the unparalleled National Archaeological Museum, below, where we took in the Pompeiian frescoes and whatever else we could manage to see in the hour we had before meeting Susan’s Neopolitan friend, who took over from there.

Massimiliano, a 28-year-old businessman in the fashion industry with a sideline as an aspiring pop star, steered us expertly to artisan shops to show us a creative side of Naples — small clothing and jewelry stores, an 80-year-old leatherworker’s studio, an art gallery with works made of concrete, resin and cork — greeting friends and acquaintances all along the way.

We had a memorable lunch at Pizzeria Mattozzi, but we didn’t have pizza; we had a variety of seafood dishes, including fried anchovies and fried calamari the way it ought to be, octopus in red sauce, tiny tasty shrimp you eat without peeling, then pasta with razor clams (no parmesean with seafood in Naples, ever).

We thought we would never eat again.

Eclectic Arles

A THEME IS EMERGING here. I didn’t plan it, but I seem to be following the Via Domitia — the road between Rome and its colonies in Gaul. Arles and Nimes (which I visited today; it will be the subject of a separate post) were super-important in the 1st to 4th centuries, with major monuments whose astounding size and engineering call into question just how much more advanced, if at all, our own architecture and construction is today.

Above: Arles’ 2,000-year-old amphitheater by night. This was only the 20th largest in the Roman empire, though it takes a good 15 minutes to walk around it. They still use the 2,000-year-old arena for Camargue-style bullfights, which don’t aim to kill the bull, but to remove tassels from his horns with a special hook. 

For a change of pace, I’m spending three nights in one place. I’ve based myself in Arles, a small Provencal city of about 50,000, which has its challenges: first, pronouncing it (there’s gargling involved), and second, keeping cars out of my photographs. The photo ops are innumerable.

Early morning view from my window, above

Yesterday I walked the streets of Arles in free-form fashion, easily seeing most of the highlights in a day. The 1st century arena is mere meters from my hotel, the Hotel Le Calendal, above. The hotel seems tailor- made for the convenience of travelers. There’s a would-you-believe 24-hour cafe and wine bar in the lobby, full-on free internet, reasonably priced laundry service, garden that it’s been too chilly to sit in but is lovely to look at, and even a steam room and small indoor swimming pool for the use of guests. (My room is 75 euros/night.)

I checked out what’s left of the Roman baths. Below, as they look today and below that, in a model from the archaeological museum, as they looked in their prime:

The Roman theatre, below, held 10,000 in its heyday.

I visited the Fondation Vincent van Gogh, below, a contemporary art museum that aspires to display work of artists informed by van Gogh’s. I enjoyed the museum and the view from its roof terrace, but I think you have to speak the special language of art critics to understand the van Gogh connection.

Above: A gloppily painted piano and another work by Bertrand Lavier

Above: A painting by Yan Pei-Ming

I’m frankly not feeling the spirit of van Gogh here in Arles, although the city makes much of the fact that he spent some 15 productive months (many of them institutionalized) and painted 200 masterpieces in the area. Many of the sites associated with his well-known works are gone, like the drawbridge and the house he lived in (a casualty of Allied bombs in WWII). I did pop in to see the garden of what’s now called Espace van Gogh, below, the asylum to which he was taken after his ear-slicing, and bought some postcards. The Fondation van Gogh has the sole original painting that the city owns, a self-portrait, below.

In search of a meal, I headed to Place du Forum, below. The cafes around the square seemed touristy, especially the bright yellow one called Cafe van Gogh, whose claim to fame is not its food.

I resigned myself to a mediocre meal, but then decided to take a chance on Chez Caro, below, a side-street hole-in-the-wall with a chalkboard outside. It turned out to be a stylish spot that would not be out of place in Tribeca, and soon found myself eating a salad with beetroot, greens and egg, a plate of incredible cheeses, the best-ever rolls, and a glass of white followed by a glass of red (27 euros, service compris).

Saturday is market day in Arles, below, a mile-long stretch along the ring road that separates the old city from the modern one. Think Greenmarket combined with tacky street fair, plus paella and Provencal textiles, and you’ve got the idea. There were things I would have bought had I not had to carry them (notably some baskets), but nothing I truly regretted leaving behind.

I was en route to Arles’ ultra-modern archaeological museum, below, which is justifiably proud of its outstanding collection of Roman sarcophogi, sculptures and other artifacts, including an intact wooden barge of about 50 A.D., raised from the Rhone ten years ago complete with cargo and navigation equipment (it sank in a flood and was buried in sand only a few meters below the riverbed). I spent a long time looking at the detailed models of the city in the Roman era, trying to get my head around what life was actually like two millennia back.

Above: Roman amphitheaters had retractable canvas sunshades, called velum, strung on a spider-web like system of ropes. 

The barge, above, 31 meters long, made its debut at the museum in October 2013. 

Floor mosaic, just one of many at the museum from a group of villas along the Rhone. 

I’m glad I stayed put for a while in Arles.

     

Weekend in Valencia: From Bang to Hush

The peaceful Jardin del Turia on Sunday afternoon

THE VALENCIA TRIP, which started with so many bangs, ended with the pleasant Sunday hush common to most European cities. Doubly so, because it was the day after the culminating ceremonies of the five-day Fallas festival (pronounced FI-iss, by the way). I’m glad I had at least one day to experience the city at its most mellow, after the insanity of Fallas.

The festival ended Saturday night with the crema, or burning, of hundreds of massive but lightweight sculptures that decorated many of the city’s blocks and squares during the week I was there. These dubious works of satirical art were torched city-wide on Saturday night, above, along with, of course, more fireworks.

But let me backtrack a bit, for the sake of continuity…

Saturday began on a civilized note with a visit to the Museo Nacional de Ceramica, above. It’s housed in a palacio with an astonishing Baroque exterior and second French Empire interior (the building’s Gothic origins have been thoroughly obscured by a series of remodelings).

Inside are furnishings and decorative arts through the ages, 19th century period rooms, including a characteristic tiled kitchen, above, and cases of ceramic wares from pre-history through Picasso.

A street in Rusaffa strung up with lights for Fallas

We walked through Rusaffa, an attractive 1920s neighborhood of student bars, Middle Eastern cafes, and at least one butcher shop-turned-bookstore, and checked out a couple of boutique hotels for future reference. We hoped to do some shopping, but — it being the last day of Fallas, a national holiday — stores were closed.

There was one notable exception, above: a store selling fireworks and other noise-making explosives – yes, in plain sight and perfectly legal.

Valencia’s over-the-top Arts and Crafts era train station, Estacion Del Norte, above, merited another look, this time to view the stained glass and mosaics, below, in the lobby and waiting rooms. (High-speed train service to and from Madrid, which takes just 90 minutes, started last December.)

Onward to the 3-year-old L’ Almoina archaeological museum, below, built over the city’s most important ruins, from 1st century A.D. Roman roads and the earliest Christian cathedral of 304 A.D. to an almshouse of the mid-6th century Visigoth period, which gives the museum its name. (Almoina is the Arabic word for charity.)

Photo: holavalencia.net

Glass walkways suspend visitors over excavated floors and roadways, which would mean little were it not for the fascinating animated video displays that take you up from ancient foundations to watch how the city grew.

Outside the archaeological museum, above

A last-minute invitation to a VIP luncheon for Fallas bigwigs and beauty queens at a magnificent 1909 exposition hall, below, turned out to be a highlight.

Queen of the Fallas festival

The hall is an exuberant Valencian version of what they call Modernismo, hardly as austere as that which was going on simultaneously in, say, Vienna. I couldn’t get over the sight of women in costumes that must have cost thousands, smoking cigarettes and talking on cell phones. I enjoyed the company of Brazilian and Mexican journalists at our table, and there was another welcome opportunity to eat paella, below.

Dinner was at Aarop (“Syrup”), near the archaeological museum,with sections of flooring removed to reveal Roman cobblestones. The chi-chi restaurant has a Michelin star and serves a 10-course tasting menu of dishes like chilled vegetable and tuna soup, fried ray with artichokes, and snail risotto.

Then a race through the streets, dodging crowds, to the city’s main square, Ayuntamiento, above, where the biggest conflagration of all was to take place at 1AM. This post-9/11 New Yorker is not especially fond of crowds, sudden very loud noises, or massive fireballs in my vicinity, but I have to admit I had a pretty good time. As a VIP with a coveted press badge, I was on the roof of City Hall, looking down on the action, and then in a cordoned-off press area most of the time.

Fallas is extreme. It is astounding that Times-Square-style crowds, explosives, fireworks, and bonfires in very tight quarters come off without a hitch. Fire fighters from all over the region converge on the city for this night; we saw them hosing down nearby buildings before setting alight the wood and polystyrene fallas sculptures. Black smoke billows into the air, but fortunately it seems short-lived.

If Saturday night was sheer Fallas madness, Sunday morning was eerily quiet, as the city slept off all the excitement. Nevertheless, a small pack of American travel journalists just had to get a couple more items ticked off their lists. We taxied to the University of Valencia botanical garden, above, founded in 1597, moved several times, and refurbished most recently in 2000.

It’s another green respite where gravel paths wind through endemic Mediterranean plantings, with a cast iron ‘shade house,’ above, that’s a re-creation of an 1897 structure designed by Merida, the same architect who did the majestic Norte train station.

Next, we explored the city’s Museo de Bellas Artes in a blue-domed former monastery, above, Spain’s most important fine arts collection after the Prado in Madrid. The ecclesiastical art comes mostly from churches closed in the 19th century.

I spent more time on the top floor, above, among the Valencian interpreters of Impressionism and Post-impressionism, admiring landscapes and domestic scenes by artists entirely new to me.

“Las does Madres” Vicente Gomez Novella, 1873-1956

We strolled once more through the Turia riverbed park, stopping to see Santiago Calatrava’s Alameda metro station, whose swooping parabolic shapes and white broken-tile decoration echo those at the City of Arts and Sciences.

There was one last blow-out dinner at a well-known but authentic Spanish restaurant, below, tucked in a narrow lane of the city’s historic center.

The ceiling of Palacio de la Bellota (chestnuts) is hung with ham hocks. That didn’t seem promising to this lapsed-but-still-trying-vegan, but ultimately I loved the restaurant for its vegetable tapas, as well as its traditional décor and friendly red-scarved waiters. Not to mention the wine: Spanish rioja has become my new favorite red.