Igor Mitoraj in Agrigento

In 2011 — three years before his death — Igor Mitoraj installed monumental sculptures among the Greek temples of the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento, Sicily. It was the most ancient landscape his work had ever inhabited: temples built between the fifth and sixth centuries BC, dedicated to the gods of the same mythology that had sustained his entire sculptural career. Concordia, Juno, Heracles, Zeus — these were not abstract historical references but the living subjects of his bronzes, the figures whose damaged, bandaged faces he had spent forty years casting. At Agrigento, Mitoraj's work finally stood where the myths themselves had been worshipped.

📍 Valle dei Templi, Via Passeggiata Archeologica, 92100 Agrigento, Sicily

Monumental Sculptures — Valley of the Temples, 2011

Bronze · Monumental · Valley of the Temples · 2011 exhibition

The Valley of the Temples — Valle dei Templi — is the largest and best-preserved complex of ancient Greek temples outside of Greece itself, designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1997. The site extends across a ridge south of Agrigento, with seven temples in varying states of preservation overlooking the Mediterranean coast. The Temple of Concordia, built around 440 BC and still largely intact, is among the most complete ancient Greek temples in the world.

Installing Mitoraj's bronzes here in 2011 was an act of extraordinary cultural audacity — and extraordinary cultural logic. His fragmented figures of gods and heroes were not foreign objects placed in an archaeological park: they were homecomings. The Centurione, the Persée, the Eros Bendato, the mythological torsos — all of these subjects were originally worshipped in temples exactly like the ones at Agrigento. The names had been different, the language Latin rather than Greek, but the sacred geography was the same.

The installation had a specific visual quality that no interior or urban setting could replicate. The bronzes in the golden limestone landscape of the Valle dei Templi, surrounded by ancient olive trees and under the Sicilian light — a light that is harder, more horizontal, more searching than the softer light of Tuscany or the Île-de-France — acquired a presence that photographs only partially capture. The patinated bronze surfaces, designed to age and weather, were in their natural element against stone that had been doing the same for twenty-five centuries.

→ Valley of the Temples on Google Maps

Mitoraj spent his career excavating ancient mythology from modern bronze. At Agrigento, he brought it back to where the mythology had first been given form — to temples built for the same gods whose faces he had spent forty years casting.

The Valley of the Temples — What You See

The Valle dei Templi is not a conventional museum or archaeological park. It is a living landscape — olive trees grow between the temples, wild flowers cover the ground in spring, and the Mediterranean is visible from the ridge on clear days. The temples themselves range from the nearly complete (Concordia, Heracles) to substantial ruins (Juno, Zeus Olympius — of which only one column stands) to fragmentary remains. The scale is consistently larger than visitors expect: the Temple of Zeus Olympius was, when intact, the largest Doric temple ever built.

For Mitoraj visitors, the 2011 exhibition is no longer in place — the works were temporary, though the Agrigento connection remains significant in understanding his relationship with the ancient world. The site itself rewards a visit of several hours; the Museo Archeologico Regionale di Agrigento, in the modern town, holds the finds from the excavations including the remarkable Telamon figure from the Temple of Zeus.

Sicily, Magna Graecia & Mitoraj's Sources

Sicily was the heartland of Magna Graecia — the Greek colonial world of the western Mediterranean. Between the eighth and third centuries BC, Greek colonists established cities across Sicily (Syracuse, Agrigento, Selinunte, Gela) and southern Italy (Croton, Sybaris, Taranto) that rivalled the cities of mainland Greece in wealth and cultural ambition. The temples they built were sometimes larger and always more elaborately decorated than their equivalents in Athens or Corinth.

Mitoraj's entire visual world is built on this legacy — not the Athenian classical tradition specifically, but the broader ancient Mediterranean inheritance that Magna Graecia represents. His subjects are Greek in origin (Perseus, Eros, Daedalus, the centaur) but his formation was Italian (Pietrasanta, Rome, the Versilia foundries). The Agrigento installation placed him at exactly the point where these two traditions intersect: the Greek west, the Italian south, the Mediterranean basin where antiquity began.

Visiting Agrigento

The Valley of the Temples is located about 3 km south of Agrigento town centre, accessible by local bus or taxi. The nearest airports are Palermo (approximately 130 km, roughly 2 hours by car or bus) and Catania (approximately 180 km). Agrigento itself is accessible by train from Palermo (approximately 2 hours). The site is open daily; the best light for photography — and for the experience of the temples generally — is in the late afternoon, when the limestone turns gold and the shadows lengthen across the ridge.

Spring (March–May) is the ideal season, when the almond blossom (Agrigento is famous for its almond festival in February) has given way to wildflowers and the site is not yet crowded with summer visitors.

The 2011 Mitoraj exhibition at the Valley of the Temples was a temporary installation. No permanent Mitoraj sculptures are currently confirmed at the site. If you have information about any permanent placement, please contact me.

Own a Mitoraj Work?

The mythological bronzes that stood at Agrigento — Centurione, Persée, Eros Bendato — exist as collector editions at intimate scale. I buy directly, privately, anywhere in Europe.

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