One Day in Sicily, Italy | A Journey Through History

[Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] good afternoon this is Sicily largest island in the Mediterranean Sea my first time here to Sicily even though I have explored other parts of Italy glad to be here in late September the weather is uh very variable there was a lot of rain yesterday you can see Cloudy Skies it has been rain here and there in the course of my drive coming from where I am staying Casta La Mare Del Golfo which is west of Palermo which I flew into a few days ago and so I have the next few days to explore amazing Sicily as I mentioned in a previous video I am taking a little bit of a break from you know filming all day and making daily videos so I'm not exactly sure what this video is going to be as far as just what I filmed today or maybe over the next uh you know couple of days or something we shall see but today I am headed to the Valley of the temples it looks absolutely phenomenal I've driven about an hour it is another hour or so's drive to get there hoping for nice uh you know at least non-rainy weather because it is going to be a really amazing experience and historical Journey seeing these ancient Greek temples and I think probably also Roman probably various phases of History we shall see and learn more once we get there so I have a rental car up there 85 Euros per day about 90 U.S and uh so far I am loving it it is what I expected it just has that very different feeling as compared to other parts of Italy Sicily just has a very different energy feeling very kind of wild and rugged sparsely populated I've only gone through one town in the course of the past hour of driving so let's hit the road and get cruising to Valley of the temples so I'm now at the Valley of the temples which is kind of misnamed because as you can see the temple is on a Mountaintop this is the Temple of Juno there is a whole series of ancient temples here from the ancient Greek period around 500 BC so I wanted to kind of put things in context here as far as another experience of mine three years ago in Turkey some of you might remember I was at ancient Roman ruins and Amphitheater in southern turkey and a local guy offered to sell me this coin it was about like this big dark brown had inscriptions on it this image a person on a chariot and Greek writing on it he was offering to sell it to me for twenty dollars I decided to buy it having no idea if it was real or fake you know probably fake but uh I just liked it and so I bought the coin and then in the course of doing research to try to figure out what it was I figured out indeed it was a fake but it was a fake replica of a real Greek coin called a syracuseian Deca drachma the old Greek currency was the drachma DECA means 10 so a 10 drachma coin syracuseian so Syracuse was on the island of Sicily here and it was part of the same civilization as the people that built these temples here 500 BC 400 BC Etc around that time period and then coming forwards from there all kinds of history but point being then Sicily this area was Greek before the Romans took over basically everything then much of the everything was Greek and then of course the Empire shifted around considerably in the Romans dominated the entirety of the Mediterranean and so of course Sicily became Roman and now of course Italy but uh the civilization here long ago was Greek and that is what you're looking at here so this uh archaeological Park is a series of temples and apparently it is the largest archaeological Park in all of Europe and I had never heard of it before even Once I arrived in Sicily it was only after I posted my first video of Sicily that somebody remarked you have to go to the Valley of the temples and they were certainly right so uh this is a two-hour drive from where I am staying the room that I showed at the beginning castellamare de Golfo which is on the North Western corner of Sicily Sicily is shaped like a triangle and so we are now on the southern Coast the sea just a few miles away out there and out there you can see the next one so it is a five kilometer walk the entire length of the archaeological Park and then you see various temples along the way gate number three we are now close to the southeast gate of the Greek city there are few visible remains of Gate 3 the original construction 6th Century BC has been damaged by a landslide involving part of the Ridge and affected by numerous alterations conducted for various reasons on the left at the bottom of the rock face beneath the Temple of Juno that we just saw squared Limestone blocks so what I want to show here is further ahead at a lower level there are wheel ruts that signal the presence of the ancient Greek road that passed through gate three so when I was in Malta we saw the cart ruts so same idea carts passing over Stone over time will create ruts that all of the other carts will go through as well and deepen them and it looks like this is it check it out they're quite wide foreign these look almost more intentionally carved out they're much more uniform than the ones that we saw in Malta and ahead is the Temple of Concordia built in 450 BC considered one of the crowning achievements of Greek civilization you can see it certainly Rivals the Parthenon in Athens capitalism look at that view looking South across the Mediterranean Malta is out there North Africa and that is it there is not much in this part of the Mediterranean so I'm not sure what this is or when it was built it seems to be something modern there are no signs explaining [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] so some more information here the Temple of Concordia owes its name to a Latin inscription with a dedication to the harmony of the people of agrogento found in its vicinity albeit not associated to it the building in Cal serenite blocks is in Doric style 440 to 430 BC and is founded on a base with four steps it has six columns at the front and back you can see six columns there and 13 along the sides according to the tradition around the end of the 6th Century A.D the bishop Gregorius took seed in the temple and concentrated it to the Saints Peter and Paul so it was turned into a church look at these goats those horns are crazy days after 40 days [Music] and there is the modern city of agricento we have a bunch of fossils [Music] amazing apparently the sea as you can see there was once this high long long ago so not sure how well this is coming through on video but we have a rainbow look at that what an image perfect placement incredible and lots more of the fossils I have never seen fossils like this before like so many of them in the same place thank you and here we have a necropoli paleo-christiana paleo-christian necropolis the paleo-christian necropolis extends over the Colina de templey Hill of temples between the Temple of Juno and the Temple of Heracles this large cemeterial area was used between the third and sixth centuries A.D and was articulated into different sectors an area with burials cut into the walls of the Greek fortifications a large open Cemetery area a large communal catacomb a relief from the end of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth centuries A.D this fine confirms that Christians were present in the valley until the Arab Conquest here we go so I guess this is the open Cemetery area ah too bad it skated off unfortunately I thought we were going to be able to walk inside there but we'll get a view of it at least and here foreign looks like maybe it is open sometimes they have walkways going inside and look at these These Are No Ordinary cart ruts so I'm not sure what the story is with these they are so deep and very uniform looking carved out as opposed to just occurring over time so I'm not really sure but these are very impressive and then it makes a nice kind of perfect curved shape and then here we have the Temple of Heracles 6th Century BC so Heracles is the Greek god that corresponds with Hercules in Roman mythology so same God this is [Applause] and so these uh temples were all covered in like our white Plaster or something like that so they didn't look like this back then they would have been gleaming white you know perfect at least in the beginning to see that sight of this City these temples shortly after construction and the ceremonies being performed the crowds and everything man that would be such an eye-opening experience to be able to peer back into the past and see what it was really like here we go one of the columns wow and here we have the remains of the Temple of Zeus olympios so it must have been an immensely stunning Temple just looking at the size of those blocks there look at this you can see the uh grooves that I guess would have connected these uh blocks together perhaps maybe the bottom is the opposite of that [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] wow [Music]

Channel: Gabriel Traveler

Views: 14,580

Keywords: Gabriel Traveler, Gabriel Morris, travel, traveling, budget travel, travel video, adventure, adventure travel, world travel, tourism, holiday, vacation, backpacking, Sicily, Sicilian, Italy, Italian, Valley of the Temples, history, historical, ancient history, Greece, Greek, ancient Greece, temple, temples, Mediterranean, sea, Europe, European

Id: YWCuRogBEZs

Length: 20min 44sec (1244 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2023