Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples has the largest Doric temple in the Greek world. For most of the last century it did not have a theatre, and no ancient writer mentioned one.
The building turned up in the summer of 2015, about 300 yards from the church of San Nicolò, on the southern edge of the old agora. A survey team working with Maria Concetta Parello, a supervising archaeologist at the park, reported curved lines in a limestone bank. A geologist said the curves were not natural. Stone blocks on the slope above already sat in an arc.
A locally minted Greek coin depicting a crab was unearthed at the city of Akragas’ theater.
They had always been there. Pirro Marconi, who searched for the theatre in the 1920s with funds from the British naval captain Alexander Hardcastle, had been looking in the wrong place. His only written guide was a sixteenth-century history by Tommaso Fazello, who put the remains near San Nicolò and said he could barely make out the foundations.
Three seasons of digging traced two phases. The first dates to the fourth or third century BC. In the second century BC the Romans widened it from about 213 feet across to more than 300. Luigi Maria Caliò, of the University of Catania, ranks that with the theatres of Syracuse and Catania. From at least the thirteenth century, Agrigento had been stripping the blocks for churches and houses. On the west side the foundation stones were almost gone, though what survived could have carried walls 30 feet high. The upper seating, for ordinary spectators, has been cleared. The lower rows, reserved for elders and officials, had not.
Finds around the seats fit a working theatre: a small statue of a musician with a double flute, a painted terracotta mask, a fourth-century BC Gorgon mask, black-glazed pottery, and a classical coin minted in Agrigento, with Zeus’s eagle on one face and a crab on the other. On a nearby hill, 20 post-holes may mark an older wooden theatre, the type used before stone houses were built from the fourth century BC. Similar holes at the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens have been read the same way.
Parello said she hoped the 2019 season would reach the orchestra, about 12 feet down. This is the civic theatre of Akragas, the Greek city under modern Agrigento. It is not the covered lecture hall in the gymnasium, reported separately in 2025.
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