Agrigento Capital of Culture
2025: what to visit

Agrigento has been proclaimed Italian Capital of Culture 2025: a coveted recognition that rewards the City of Temples and the extraordinary artistic, literary, monumental and naturalistic heritage of its territory. It won an articulated project that will involve Agrigento, Lampedusa and the municipalities of the province until 2025 in the realization of a dense program of cultural initiatives that have as their cornerstones the reception, cultural exchange, the relationship with nature and social mobility. An extraordinary opportunity to discover Agrigento and the municipalities of its territory: a widespread cultural and artistic field as precious as little known. To help you have a full and easy to consult panorama, we have sorted by areas of interest and itineraries all the attractions, places, cities and villages to visit in the territory of Agrigento.

Agrigento Capital of Culture 2025: what to see and visit

• Valley of the Temples of Agrigento
• Historic center of Agrigento
• Sea and Nature: the beaches, oases and nature reserves
• Itinerary 1: from Porto Empedocle to Ribera
• Itinerary 2: Caltabellotta, Sciacca, Menfi
• Itinerary 3: Favara, Aragona, Racalmuto
• Itinerary 4 : Sicani Mountains Northwest area
• Itinerary 4: Sicani Mountains Northeast area
• Itinerary 5: Naro, Palma di Montechiaro, Licata

Exploring Agrigento and its territory you will discover a crossroads of civilizations, a stratification of stories, a varied composition of culture and nature: sources of inspiration for philosophers, writers and artists of all times. So it was for Empedocles, one of the noble fathers of philosophy, who matured in Akragas, the Agrigento of the fifth century BC, the unifying and disintegrating dynamics of the four original elements: Water, Air, Earth and Fire. The same Agrigento of the classical age that 2 millennia later inflamed with passion all the travelers of the Grand Tour, from Goethe to Guy de Maupassant, from Dumas to Stolberg. Between the ‘700 and ‘800, in fact, illustrious characters came here from all over Europe to discover in the enchanted landscape of the Valley of the Temples, in the Roman sarcophagi of the Cathedral of Agrigento and in the archaeological sites of the territory the sublime testimonies of a timeless beauty, source of inspiration and ascetic well-being.

Luigi Pirandello, Nobel Prize for Literature, was inspired by the daily reality of Agrigento, Porto Empedocle and Aragona at the end of the 19th century to lay bare and then stage the fictions, social masks and chaos that is in every individual. More recently Andrea Camilleri has transfigured places, vices and virtues of the inhabitants of his Porto Empedocle in the Inspector Montalbano’s Vigata, just as Leonardo Sciascia did with his Racalmuto in Le Parrocchia di Regalpetra: a book in which all the themes of one are present the controversial and contradictory Sicily, later developed in other famous writings conserved at the Sciascia Foundation. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa is no exception: it is easy to recognize in the Donnafugata described in the novel “Il Gattopardo” the places of his ancestors and his youth, such as the Benedictine Monastery and the Cathedral of Palma di Montechiaro.

Why did Agrigento win the title of Capital of Culture? Out of the other nine Italian cities candidates for the title of Italian Capital of Culture 2025, Agrigento won by presenting a project dossier – curated by Roberto Albergoni, president of the MeNO Association – that included not only the City of Temples but the entire territory: from Licata to Sciacca, from Lampedusa to Santo Stefano Quisquina. The island of Lampedusa, Mediterranean outpost of the province of Agrigento, Italy and Europe, represents for its peculiar position the first cultural laboratory of the Agrigento territory where the Mediterranean peoples have always met, from antiquity to the present day. The dossier entitled “The Self, the other and nature. Relations and cultural transformations” contains 44 projects, 17 of which are international, aimed at enhancing and creating new connections between different realities.

A project activity aimed at relating the different attractions of which the Agrigento territory overflows, starting from the less known ones such as the Punta Bianca Reserve, the Diocesan Museum, the Lucchesiana Library, to the most famous ones such as the Valley of the Temples, the Scala dei Turchi in Realmonte, the Andromeda Theater in Santo Stefano Quisquina,  the Farm Cultural Park in Favara. An ambitious program that leverages the 2600 years of history of Agrigento looks at the new generations, inclusion, new technologies and therefore the future of the territory.

What does it mean to be the Italian Capital of Culture? Being Capital of Culture allows you to turn the spotlight on a specific territorial reality, highlighting its cultural richness, the plurality of places, attractions, natural beauties. A great opportunity for social and economic development linked to cultural tourism that produces benefits on the quality of life, employment, the economy in general. Overcoming the competition of the other nine finalist cities such as Aosta, Assisi, Asti, Bagnoregio, Monte Sant’Angelo, Orvieto, Pescina, Roccasecca and Spoleto, Agrigento won the title of Italian Capital of Culture 2025.

A unique opportunity to make cultural production the fulcrum of the development of Agrigento and its territory, creating new synergies between inherited heritage, natural resources, places and people. A recognition not only, therefore, to the extraordinary historical and monumental beauties but also to a community that for 2600 years has welcomed stimuli and cultural contaminations to transform them into a richer collective identity capable of looking confidently to the future.