Page 438 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

Via Atenea and Rabato

Agrigento’s main shopping street, the semi-pedestrianized Via Atenea is pleasant
enough, with a tangle of steep, narrow side streets harbouring ramshackle palazzi and
minuscule cortili (courtyards). At the far end of Via Atenea is Piazza Sinatra, beyond

which is the Rabato district, the old (and now very dilapidated) Arab quarter, still
showing signs of a landslide in 1966 that destroyed much of the historic centre and left
7500 homeless. Although there are a handful of B&Bs in Rabato, full-blown
gentrification is dragging its heels.

Santo Spirito

Piazza Santo Spirito • If closed, ring the bell at Piazza Santo Spirito 8

The Santo Spirito church and its adjoining convent began life as part of a grand
Norman palace belonging to the Chiaramonte family, and were bequeathed to the
Cistercian order in the thirteenth century by a widowed baron mourning the death of
his young wife. There is usually a young nun about to show you around the interior,

where florid early eighteenth-century monochrome stuccoes by Serpotta sprawl across
the walls and domed trompe l’oeil ceiling.

Back on Piazza Santo Spirito, if you ring the bell at no. 8 and ask for “dolci di
mandorla”, a nun will bring you a tray of almond cakes, which are expensive, chewy,
and worth the experience. If you are lucky there will also be sweet couscous (cuscus
dolce), made to a recipe the nuns inherited – along with seven Tunisian servants –
back in the thirteenth century.

SAN PIETRO AND THE BELLS

Pirandello spent much of his boyhood in a house overlooking Piazza Jose Maria
Escriva and the church of San Pietro. The story goes that Pirandello’s father, a

supporter of Garibaldi and committed anti-clericist, was so incensed by the racket of