It’s hard to summon images of carnage when the bleached golden ruins of Selinunte come into view. Recon-struction did not take place until the late 1950s, so Margarett would not have seen the temple gorgeous against a blue sky on this grassy hill. On another rise, just a few columns emerge from massive rubble, as if the temple were awakening from a sleep of millennia. As we tour the skeleton of a vast city, I imagine crowds of merchants and shoppers and, at the almost intact Sanctuary of Demeter Malphoros, worshippers carrying tiny votive images of the goddess, examples of which we’ll see the following day in the archaeological museum in Agrigento.
At Agrigento, ruins of temples and an ancient garden crown a hill, now a park called Valle dei Templi (Valley of the Temples), from which you can see the modern city, built from the same pinkish stone. Margarett posed for a now lost photograph at the Temple of Concord, the most complete of the structures, and as I approach, I picture her between its columns, tall and dressed in black. I spend hours there watching the light change on the ancient stone.
Our second morning, I rouse myself at five, leaving my sister asleep. “I saw them in many different hours & lights,” Margarett had written of the temples. Driving in the darkness, I am startled when the Temple of Heracles, a sequence of columns at the summit of the hill, blazes into view, still illuminated, orange against the black sky, the moon silvery and small. Leaving the car, I breathe in the cool air, standing there as dawn opens the sky to blue, the hills turn bright green and, their artificial light suddenly turned off, the columns fade to golden pink. If I can just hold this vision—“ever changing temporal geometry,” I write in my notebook, “against an eternity of sky.”
Taormina, said to be the most romantic place in Sicily, was on Margarett’s list, and I have chosen it for our last two days. A legendary seaside resort, it offers a heart-stopping craggy shoreline—one offshore island is called, simply, Isola Bella, “beautiful island.” In the distance is Mount Etna, the still fuming volcano that had its most serious eruption in 1669 and was known to the ancients as the forge of Vulcan, the god of fire.
