By Maddie and Haley

We woke up at 8AM and went to breakfast in the hotel where we had dinner the night before. We both had croissants and water. We have noticed that lots of foods like croissants are a lot different here as they are much more sweet than savory. For croissants, rather than tons of butter, it is topped with powder sugar or a sugary glaze. After breakfast we went back to our rooms to pack up and then came down at 9AM, grabbed our lunches, and hopped on the bus. First, we took a short bus ride for awesome pictures at the white Turkish steps with a cliff side view.

After we got as many pictures as possible, we got back on the bus and headed to Agrigento to visit the Valley of the Temples. Greeks believed in starting with gods involved with the earth and they worked their way up to the top with divine and young gods and goddesses. That means we started at the bottom (Chthonic temples) and worked our way to the top of ridge looking at each temple. The first thing we saw was the Atlas figure, known as “Telemon”. Then we walked a ways and saw Zeus’s altar, and the ruins of his temple. If his temple was still constructed, it would be the largest temple in the valley. Next was the temple of Concordia, and it was fully constructed. they later turned this temple into a church. Finally, we saw Hera’s temple which was fully constructed. We then took a walk to meet our bus driver Salvatore with the bus, and drove to have lunch outside of a gelateria, Ragno D’Oro (golden spider).We had sandwiches and apples for lunch and then we both got stratiacella gelato. It was the best gelato we have had so far on our trip. After that we embarked on a two hour drive and headed to our last site of gathering day, Villa Romana del Casale (Piazza Armerina): Imperial Roman Villa. Our challenge was to go inside this 32,000 square foot house and take pictures of certain mosaics and figure out the room number on a map.

Since we weren’t allowed to walk on the ancient mosaics, there were catwalks for us to use as we walked through the villa. There were so many other tourists from other countries, some of which were very rude and pushy. After working our way through all of them we completed our challenge and headed to the market where we both bought bracelets and water. We returned to our new hotel in Syracuse, and had dinner before going to sleep.