The last couple of days, I've seen more than a few ruins of Greek temples, and I can't help thinking that it is amazing that there are perhaps more well-preserved Greek temples in Italy than there are in Greece. The entire area was part of Magna Grecia in the 6th to 2nd centuries B.C. Another interesting point is that some of the temples are bigger than those built in Greece. The Doric style of Greek architecture involved building temples on a human scale. However, in an attempt to show off to mother Greece, some of the colonies threw this aside and built gargantuan structures. The collapsed temple of Zeus, that I saw today, was nearly 400 feet long and 140 feet high when standing.
Some of the most interesting sites that I visited were a temple and theater at Segesta and the world-renouned "Valley of the Temples" in Agrigento. Visiting all of these ancient ruins has really gotten me thinking about how time can bring some serious change, whether good or bad. The interesting part about this is that even an area that has remained relatively static over the years can have a completely changed function. In Segesta, what was once a theater and fortress city (built by the Elinins in the 5th century B.C.) became a castle in the middle ages for its ability to command the surrounding land. Today, it is merely an abandoned hilltop with ruins that provides a place to enjoy the nature and watch the scenery.
The city of Erice is another example. What was once a fortress city is now a town with 300 permanent residents and 30 catholic churches. Another spectacular change: one of the largest sources of the town's visitors is a nuclear physics institute housed in what was once a monastery with its larger meetings in a nearby church. Seeing this change in the function of these buildings, I can't help thinking that to some people, science is a sort of religion and perhaps professors are the monks of today.
With this talk of nuclear physics, I'll end by translating a quote by Albert Einstein I saw in Italian on a t-shirt, "There are two things that are infinite: the universe and human stupidity. I'm not quite sure about the first."
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Grr, Max, I typed in this long and mildly-witty comment, and then your stupid blog didn't accept it. Rawr. Anyway, it was something along the lines of "Valle dei Templi, I've been there, and it was really cool, except it was 40 degrees F and pouring down rain so actually it was really cold" and then another thing to the effect of "Sicily's Greek ruins may be pretty neat, but the government of Greece takes _much_ better care of their temples than Italy does of their."
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