Agrigento Favorites

Favorite thing: Pass my death over / In silence. / Friends and enemies, I beg you / Not to write about it in newspaper, / Not to mention it at all. / No announcement, no publication. / Do not dress me when I’m dead. / Wrap me, naked, in a sheet. No flowers / On the bed, no candle burning. / A second-rate hearse, the one for the poor. Bare. / No-one to follow, no relatives / Nor friends. / Just the hearse, horse, and coachman, / No-one else. / Let my body be burn. And, once / Burnt, let it be dispersed, for / I wish nothing, not even my ashes, / To remain of me. But if that cannot / Be done, then let my cinerary urn be / Taken to Sicily and be embedded in some / Rough stone in the country of Girgenti / Where I was born.

Luigi Pirandello

Fondest memory: Luigi Pirandello was born in Agrigento in 1867 from a wealthy bourgeois family. His interest in philology led him to attend university in Palermo, Rome and Bonn, where he took his degree in 1891 with a thesis on Greek-Sicilian dialects and worked one year as a lecturer in Italian. Back to Italy, he joined the Roman literary milieu, collaborating with the Nuova Antologia with poems and critical essays. Following a financial setback which affected him and his wife Antonietta Portulano, who gave him three children, Pirandello began teaching stylistics and literature at the Magistero in Rome (1897-1922). After War World I he wrote most of the plays which were to make him famous throughout the world. From 1926 to 1934 he established a theatrical company in which Marta Abba excelled, an actress to whom he dedicated some of his plays: “Vestire gli ignudi” and “L’amica delle mogli”. He became a member of the Accademia d’Italia in 1929 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. He died in Rome in 1936, while working on his drama “I giganti della montagna”. As testified by his working, including novels, plays and essays, Pirandello can be regarded as one of the foremost Italian and European authors of the early 20C.

Favorite thing: Visit the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento just before the light starts to go. You can get there by bus to Agrigento, then a local bus number 2 to the temples. The area to the left of the road is best but see both sides if you can manage it.

Fondest memory: The 'Festa del mandorlo in fiori' in Agrigento. Festival of almond blossom'There were people in brightly coloured clothing from much of the world in procession through the city and a terrific firework display and concert on the last day - end of second week in February.

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Favorite thing: the natural beauty of Sicily

Fondest memory: The temples

Favorite thing: To be completed.

Favorite thing: Biblioteca Comunale
States Archives
Civic Museum
National Archeological Museum