Sicily Day Trip: Valley of the Temples

Denise

Looking back, I realize that Dwayne and I, and usually Kyla, do one big day tour out from our landing spot, and in Sicily, it was the Valley of Temples. For millennia, Sicily was a great place to land for anyone with a boat and sword—a bloodthirsty power complex could be added later if not already fully developed. The Temples are a mix of ruined ruins and astonishingly well-preserved ruins from a Greek building spree about 2,500 years ago. They were an interesting counterpoint to the numerous Roman ruins we keep stumbling across.

There are three things I want to hold on to from this trip.

  1. The Temple of Concordia is easily the most intact temple in Sicily and beautiful as well. Her eternal youth comes from being continuously useful (and therefore, maintained), first as a temple to unknown deities and then being repurposed as a Christian church for many centuries. But what made me fall smashingly hard for this temple was this modern statue of Icarus placed just so. 
On one hand, I want to live in a world where this ancient statue has been left unmolested (unmelted?) for millennia just for the sheer rightness of the heart-aching beauty of the scene. On the other hand, I have a new artist, Igor Mitoraj*, to chase around the world.

2. The only way to account for the state of Zeus’s Temple is that Colossal Toddlers got away from the governess for an afternoon.  But these giant figures were intended to hold up the roof of this enormous building. One was somewhat reconstructed on the ground, but the best-looking ruins were reassembled at the nearby museum. The model shows what the temple may have looked like with these man-shaped support columns.

3. Cyprus was just a warmup for how beautiful a Mediterranean island can be. Following Google Maps home, we had a wild cross-country drive from the south to the north coast**. Perhaps we hit the season just right, but it was green and lush and mountainous, with the wind waving tall grassy meadows in symphonies.  Occasionally having to stop for a goat herd was just a bonus.

What we don’t want to remember, though I think we are doomed to, is driving the narrow “streets”.  Dwayne asked me to take pictures of the route through the towns that Google, with a straight face, directed us through. I have thoughts and feelings about driving in Italy. I’ll share once the meds kick in.

*Sadly, Igor died in 2014, but clearly, his sculptures are his slice of immortality.

**You might be wondering why we didn’t take the freeway back the way we came. We ask that as well, Google.

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