**1. Introduction**

The debate about the consequences of entering the Anthropocene Epoch [1] is at the centre of the reflections of many researchers who have dedicated themselves to analysing the dynamics of humankind's use and consumption of resources at the expense of nature's regenerative abilities, adopting lifestyles that have long proved unsustainable. The landscapes of the Anthropocene are the product of the humankind's predatory attitude towards the environment [2] which, especially since the Great Acceleration [3], has broken the ecosystem's balance with nature and will eventually overwhelm the thresholds of the planet's limits, beyond which unforeseeable chain reactions and potentially catastrophic scenarios will likely occur [4].

As Barbera [5] states, it is possible to find answers to the questions of the Anthropocene by looking to the landscape. The analysis of human–landscape interactions in Anthropocene landscapes is an essential interpretative key for better understanding the evolution of our current environment and can provide useful information on the phenomena that gave rise to the Anthropocene. In this context, agriculture is at the centre of human interference in natural cycles; therefore, profound reforms in agriculture and food systems [6] will need to be achieved in the coming years if we want to live within the

**Citation:** Badami, A.A. Managing the Historical Agricultural Landscape in the Sicilian Anthropocene Context. The Landscape of the Valley of the Temples as a Time Capsule. *Sustainability* **2021**, *13*, 4480. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su13084480

Academic Editor: Alejandro Rescia

Received: 23 March 2021 Accepted: 14 April 2021 Published: 16 April 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

boundaries of the planet, acting within what Rockström defines as a "safe operating space for humanity" [4].

Finding a point of balance with nature does not necessarily mean returning to a predisturbance stage, but rather finding new ecosystem balances [7]. The study of traditional agricultural systems [8], the subject of disciplines such as landscape archaeology and historical ecology, is particularly useful in the search for principles upon which to establish new human–environment balances [9,10]. It might also be useful to look back to the past to understand how the Great Acceleration gave a boost to the Anthropocene. Evaluating the signs of our domination is already the beginning of change and, in this sense, reading the "vanished landscapes" can help us start this process.

This article describes one of the complex and multi-specific landscapes still surviving in Italy, recorded in the National Register of Historical Rural Landscapes [11]. Some landscapes, in fact, characterised by a fine-grained polycultural mosaic, constitute living archives of exceptional value for the conservation of biodiversity. Among these, just to mention the best known, there are the "Terraced and irrigated chestnut groves and vegetable gardens in Alta Valle Sturia" (Liguria, Northern Italy); the "Landscape mosaic of Montalbano" (Tuscany, Central Italy); the "Polycultures of Loretello" (Marche, Central Italy); the "Mixed hill cultures of the lower Irpinia", the "Terraced orchard-gardens of the hills of Naples" (Campania, Southern Italy); the "Polyculture on the slopes of Mt. Etna" and the "Mixed orchards of the Temples Valley" (Sicily, Southern Italy) [12].

The latter is an exceptional pre-Anthropocene landscape, that is, a case in which a particular regime of constraints has safeguarded a wide territorial environment, preventing its transformation precisely at the start of the period of the Great Acceleration.

The Valley of the Temples in Agrigento (Sicily, Italy) is an archaeological area subject to landscape constraints since the mid-1960s and which extends over an area of more than 1400 hectares. This area, removed from the transformation processes by these constraints, has remained marginalised from the general evolution of the local area. Thus, in this space, traces of dormant landscapes that have disappeared elsewhere have been preserved as real "reserves of history" which are an important point of reference for evaluating the effects of the Anthropocene. The environments that have been preserved allow both to bring back to life animal and plant species that are rare elsewhere, and to revive artisanal and preindustrial agricultural production systems together with their internal eco-sustainability.

The case analysed makes it possible to critically rethink consolidated development paradigms and to search for new ways of using and consuming the territory's resources in terms of contents, values and potential. The landscape of the Valley has been enhanced as a natural and cultural ecosystem through a series of initiatives that constitute good practices in land management. The establishment of the *Living Museum of the Almond Tree* (a genetic bank for the conservation of the intraspecific biodiversity of the species), the restoration of the *Kolymbethra Garden* (an agricultural area that had been forgotten for over 50 years and, like a message in a bottle or a time capsule, survived through the years of the Great Acceleration in a state of apparent death) and other initiatives carried out in the Valley of the Temples, with the help of agricultural techniques which evolved over the centuries for the cultivation of this specific territory and which we have inherited from the knowledge of the local elderly farmers, have awakened the agricultural landscape from a long sleep.

Thanks to the extraordinary resilience of nature, supported by the historical explorations of 'placed environmental knowledge' [13], it has been possible to save rare plant species that enrich the biodiversity of the landscape from extinction. Through the analysis and comparison of the biodiversity of past and present landscapes, in the case in question as elsewhere in similar situations, specific sites are, effectively, archives that provide valuable information from the past that we must learn how to implement and update for a virtuous combination of human environmental transformation and sustainable ecological models of wise use of the territory.

#### **2. Levels of Awareness of the Ecological Footprint of Humankind in the Anthropocene**

The intense changes that humanity has imposed, and continues to impose with exponential speed, on the Earth system are pushing us to search for new models of interpretation of the reality that surrounds us and for different ways of using the planet's resources.

Climate change, famine and migration, pollution are the by-products of these changes that have now taken on an epochal dimension [14]. In this regard, Crutzen and Stoermer's [1] studies evaluating of the impact of human-induced transformations on global ecology are well known. In his article "Geology of Mankind" [15], Crutzen highlighted how the human species has become a geological force in the sense that the effects of its activities are comparable to those of natural processes, a thesis that has recently been confirmed and supported by others [16]. In view of these processes, Crutzen put forward the proposal to integrate the current geological epoch, the Holocene, with a new era which he suggested calling "Anthropocene", that is, a geological age dominated by humans. Currently, the *Anthropocene Working Group*—a group of experts appointed by the International Subcommittee on Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Union of Geological Sciences—has been working since 2009 to gather scientific evidence in order to formally ratify the Anthropocene as an epoch within the geological time scale [17].

The studies by Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, starting from the postulate that the industrial era (1800–1945) marked the first phase of the Anthropocene, identify a second phase marked by what is called the "Great Acceleration", that is, a rapid and pervasive change in human–environment relations that occurred after the end of the Second World War. To measure the phenomena of global change, the authors considered the following indicators: population, total real GDP, direct foreign investment, the damming of rivers, water use, fertiliser consumption, urban population, paper consumption, McDonald's restaurants, transport (motor vehicles), communication (telephones), international tourism [3]. All indicators recorded a dramatic surge in values starting from the 1950s.

A decade later, studies carried out by McNeill and Engelke [16] have reported the planet's resource consumption data since the Great Acceleration, figures that have increased ten-fold in just over half a century. Thus, an awareness has emerged that the consumption dynamics of the Anthropocene have definitively transformed the resources of nature into the limits of development.

*The limits to Growth* were announced in 1972 by the Club of Rome [18]. The group of environmental and Earth system scholars led by Rockström and Steffen added, in 2009, the "limits of the planet". Exceeding the thresholds could also affect mutually related parameters and trigger additive consequences, non-linear systemic feedbacks and unpredictable chain reactions [5].

The Great Acceleration cannot, and must not, last much longer. From this awareness— according to the interpretation of McNeill and Engelke [16]—began the third phase of the Anthropocene, around 2015, a turning point that has shaken our consciences towards the sustainable managemen<sup>t</sup> of the planet's resources. We can trace the beginnings of this turning point to the 1960s, when environmentalism was born and then later, in the 1980s, when rising temperatures confirmed global warming as a reality.

In the third phase of the Anthropocene, it is universally recognised that human activities influence the structures and functioning of the Earth system as a whole (a vision that opposes the searching for solutions to environmental problems on a local or sectoral scale). Despite the general sharing of this dangerous drift of the current development model, state governments still do not prove themselves sufficiently committed to adopting measures to reduce, mitigate or offset the effects [19,20]. Rockström's studies highlight that it is very difficult to re-establish "a safe operating space" [21–23] for human activities due to the fact that prevailing economic and political paradigms do not pay adequate attention to environmental issues [4].

As Barbera has observed [5], due to the harmful effects caused by the Great Acceleration which had transformed nature from a resource to a limit, the sudden leap forward in human activities in the second half of the twentieth century led to many limits being

surpassed, altering the planet's bio-geophysical processes and ecosystem relations. Faced with the complexity of the problem, Barbera indicates that we must seek solutions through an integrated multidisciplinary approach, hoping for the necessary convergence of scientific and humanistic knowledge, and address the issue in global and systemic terms, i.e., at the scale of the entire planet and referring to all its inhabitants (humans, plants, animals). In the systemic vision, says Barbera, the landscape is the set of characteristics of a territory, a meeting place between nature and history, an ecosystem capable of producing negative entropy and restoring order in the dissipative disorder of the Anthropocene.

### **3. Managing Anthropocene Landscapes**

The increase in resource consumption during the Great Acceleration caused a progressive increase in intensive agriculture, industrialisation and urbanisation which transformed natural landscapes by changing the topography, vegetation cover, physical and chemical properties of the soil and water balances, thus inducing large changes in sediment and nutrient retention [24].

The analysis of human–nature interactions in Anthropocene landscapes is an essential interpretative key to better understand the evolution of our current environment [25]. In this context, agriculture is at the centre of human interference in natural cycles (phosphorus, nitrogen, water, etc.); it is therefore necessary to change agri–food systems in the coming years if we want to live within the boundaries of the planet [4].

Mick Lennon [7] warns that it is not possible to manage Anthropocene landscapes by returning degraded ecosystems to a pre-disturbance reference point [16]. The climatic, geological and ecological environments of ecosystems have profoundly changed in the Anthropocene. He therefore proposes the concept of "new ecosystems", that is, the composition of configurations of non-historical species that arise due to the environmental change of the Anthropocene, a self-evolutionary response of the biosphere to human influence [7].

Since species follow the mechanisms of the theory of evolution, we could extend the concept to agriculture, land cultivation techniques, land uses, production and resource consumption patterns; it will be necessary to select from the past which of these have proven to be the best in terms of sustainable development and review them to update them in new configurations.

The managemen<sup>t</sup> of the agricultural landscape in its Anthropocene transition must also be considered, as Barbera [5] observes, on the basis of the multiple benefits it provides to humankind. The author therefore proposes to define the notion of landscape not in the sense of a set of interacting ecosystems, but in the sense of cultural landscape, that is, as a combined work of nature and human beings. The landscape, therefore, concerns not only the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the biosphere but also the culture of the populations, their needs—material and immaterial—meanings, symbols, artistic expressions, etc.

### **4. Materials and Methods**

#### *4.1. The Valley of the Temples of Agrigento as a Case Study*

As an antidote to predatory Anthropocentrism, several authors have insisted on the urgen<sup>t</sup> need to change current development models. Respecting the limits of the planet is the only way, according to Rockström, that we can enter what he calls "the good Anthropocene" [26].

"Neoanthropocene" is the term with which Carta proposes a new way of inhabiting the Earth, or a transition towards a new, more sensitive and responsible humanism based on the principles of social justice, coexistence of peoples and species, sharing, the circular economy, recycling and radical ecology [27].

Barbera uses the holistic interpretative categories of the landscape as a natural and cultural ecosystem to propose a radical transformation of our way of thinking and, consequently, of using the planet's resources. To address the issues of territorial development,

he argues that "through the landscape (its government, its project) one can seek and find answers to the questions of the Anthropocene" [5], p. 11 (author's translation).

It might also be useful to heed the reflections of McNeill and Engelke [16], who sugges<sup>t</sup> looking back to try to understand what brought us to the current situation and how the Great Acceleration gave a boost to the Anthropocene. A case study that allows us to analyse a landscape of the past is the archaeological site of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento. This case study is reported because (unlike the contexts in which landscape archaeology or palaeobotany is practised) living ecosystems have been preserved there which have stratified over the centuries and have not been irreparably overwhelmed and devastated by the Great Acceleration.

The name Valley of the Temples indicates what was once the area of the Greek city of Akragas, founded at the beginning of the 6th century BC (581 BC) by Rhodesian–Cretan settlers along the southern coast of western Sicily (Figure 1), which extended for about 456 ha between the Girgenti Hill and Rupe Atenea to the north and the plateau delimited by the sacred road to the south, on a territory crossed by the two rivers, the Akragas and Hypsas.

**Figure 1.** (**a**) Location of Sicily (Italy) in the Mediterranean Sea; (**b**) topographic map of Sicily with the hydrographic network. The archaeological site of Akragas, between the Akragas and Hypsas rivers, is in red.

The place where the city was founded was chosen based on political and landscape considerations. The site is located halfway between Selinus and Gela, colonies founded, respectively, by Greeks from Attica and Rhodian–Cretan populations. The two cities, both Greek colonies but enemies because they belonged to different lineages, were among the most powerful in Sicily in the 6th century BC, and they tended to expand their range of territorial influence more and more. The city of Gela founded Akragas to stem the expansionist aims of Selinus, but in a short time the subcolony became much larger, more populous, richer and more powerful than the mother city, experiencing its maximum splendour in the classical period (5th century BC) with an estimated population of 300,000 inhabitants.

From the landscape point of view, the site chosen for the foundation of Akragas has ideal morphological characteristics for the expansion of the city, for its defence and control of the territory (Figure 2). Most of the urban centre was built on a gently sloping southwestern plateau bordered to the south by a high vertical rock face rising from a plain at sea level. Six temples were built on top of the terminal edge of the plateau (including the monumental Olympieion which, with its 112.70 m at the stylobate, is the largest temple in the Hellenised world). The purpose of this placement of the temples on the edge of the rocky ridge was to show all the power and wealth of the city to intimidate any enemies that came from the sea (at the time the only access route to the territory) and to increase the monumentality and visibility of the temples.

**Figure 2.** Akragas: reconstruction from photointerpretation (Schmiedt and Griffo), published in *Urbanistica*, n. 48, 1966, tav. 4. The map is north-oriented.

The inclination of the plateau, on which the layout of the city was traced according to the "Hippodamian Plan", was favourable to the disposal of waters which, with an ingenious underground water system, flowed into a retention basin. The acropolis dominated the inhabited area, built on the Girgenti hill which, at 800 m above sea level, stood out on the plateau and on the marine horizon.

The city was close to the sea but at a safe distance that allowed the enemy to be seen in time to activate defences. The connection with the sea for the transport of goods to be marketed in the Mediterranean Sea was ensured by the two rivers that bordering the city, ensuring all the advantages of a maritime city.

An imposing circuit of walls surrounded the entire city; the walls were built using the southern rocky ridge, the Girgenti hill and the Rupe Atenea to the north, taking advantage of the natural gradients connected by massive walls.

The surface delimited by the walls thus built, about 456 ha, was not entirely occupied by buildings; in fact, the steeper or more peripheral parts were used for agriculture and arboriculture. A peri-urban landscape made up of cultivated fields and fruit orchards alternating with wooded areas was already present in the ancient polycultural landscape located in the peri-urban areas of the island of Crete—motherland of Akragas—during the 4-3 millennium BC [12]. Furthermore, the presence of centuries-old olive trees within the city and next to the temples (Figures 3 and 4) can, most likely, testify to the sacred character attributed to the tree as a divine gift to humanity [28].

**Figure 3.** Archaeological Park of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento. Remains of the Olympieion mixed with the vegetation. The most represented tree species are the olive, almond, carob and pistachio.

The presence of a rock sanctuary dedicated to Demeter, goddess of nature who presided over the crops and harvesting, testifies to the cultivation of cereals, a characteristic of ancient Greek food traditions. The agricultural landscape in classical Greek times also included grazing areas; the decorations of numerous vases found at the site depict horses, and the breeding of horses for military and sporting purposes (participation in the Olympic Games) is also referenced in numerous literary sources (Diodorus Siculus, *Bibliotheca Historica*; Virgilio, *Aeneide*; Pindaro, *VI Pitica* and *III Isthmica*).

The inclusion of the city of Akragas in the Sicilian coastal landscape reached admirable levels of harmony and integration with nature which testifies, once again, to the grea<sup>t</sup> sensitivity to the landscape and the technical skills achieved by the Greek colonists.

The city's heyday ended with its defeat inflicted by the Carthaginians in 406 BC. The city was almost completely destroyed and, in 339, was partially rebuilt and repopulated, without ever reaching the glories of the classical period. The history of the Greek colony ends in 210 BC with the Roman conquest during the second Punic War [29–34].

The city gradually lost importance after the Roman conquest until it was reduced, in the Middle Ages, to a small urban settlement perched on Girgenti Hill. The current urban settlement, Agrigento, is much smaller than the Greek city and has just over 55,000 inhabitants.

**Figure 4.** Archaeological Park of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento. Stenopos between the agora and the sacred road. Remains of the forest of almond and olive trees.

After the fall of Akgragas, the history of the agricultural landscape of the Greek colony follows the fate of the Sicilian landscape. Having become the first Roman province in the 3rd century, Sicily was exploited for the production of extensive wheat-based crops, for the breeding of animals (and therefore large areas were set aside for grazing), for the production of wine. The region was heavily plundered as all these products were not intended for local consumption but were transported on ships to Rome. With the spread of extensive crops, the new agricultural landscape design was the "*latifundum*" (large estate).

A long period of increased humidity during the last centuries of the Roman period (IV-VI century) favoured the agrarian economy in Sicily until the late Roman–Byzantine period [35]. A sudden climatic shift towards aridity, which took place in 750 AD, caused a change in the hydrological conditions with a consequent general socio-economic decline. The consequent weakening of the Byzantine communities made them particularly vulnerable to the Islamic conquest, which took place between 827 and 878 AD. As Ferrara describes,

"with the arrival of the Arabs on the island, an authentic agrarian revolution began: introduction of new crops, innovative soil improvement techniques and hydraulic systems which contributed to a better use of water resources, a temporal and spatial differentiation of production and a more integrated view of the agricultural system in all its components (irrigation, energy, micro-climate and aesthetic functions): a completely different approach to agriculture which, for its holistic nature, could be indeed defined as agroecology. Such structural revolution marked deeply the Sicilian agrarian landscape; it was the beginning of the *coltura promiscua* system, based on an authentic intercropping of the fruit trees" [35], p. 140.

The Arabs imported, in particular, citrus fruits which began to spread throughout the Mediterranean. Their presence contributed to the modification and enrichment of the characteristics of the Mediterranean landscape. The Arabs also introduced irrigation systems so efficient that they could greatly increase the irrigable land, replacing extensive cultivation with intensive cultivation. Even today in the Sicilian countryside, spared from the frenetic rush toward modernisation, there are remains of the ancient Arab irrigation systems that in Sicily have become so integrated into the local culture that they have also taken on names in various local dialects (*saie, cunnutti, gebbie*, etc.). Even today, some of the older farmers remember how they used to work.

The Norman conquest of Sicily and the subjugation of the Arabs led, starting from the late Middle Ages, to the feudal structuring of the society and, consequently, to the return to agricultural managemen<sup>t</sup> based on the *latifundum,* marking a substantial regression in agricultural production compared to the Arab restructuring.

Mediterranean landscapes increased their biodiversity again when new species were introduced by the conquest of the American continent: the most important for its impact on the natural and rural landscape of Sicily was the prickly pear [12].

The structuring of agricultural production imposed on Sicily by the Romans with the large estates continued to persist until the 20th century, when agricultural mechanisation also began in Sicily. Immediately after the First World War, the Fascist regime tried to revive the ancient Roman concept of Sicily as the "granary of Italy", but the large-scale cultivation of wheat was not well managed and impoverished the soil [35].

The large estate system was officially dismantled after World War II, but the new land system, based on small private ownership, was unable to provide peasants with sufficient means. All this indicates that agriculture in Sicily, despite the good quality of its soil and the favourable climate, does not form a solid basis for economic development for individual agricultural entrepreneurs. Furthermore, after the abolition of the feudal system and the mechanisation of agriculture, civil uses and customary rights were progressively abolished and the common lands, which were used by the resident population for both grazing and wood harvesting and temporary cultivation, were sold to private individuals [36].

For centuries, the area occupied by the ancient Greek city of Akragas, the current archaeological area, was considered the land of the *civita*, that is, an area available to the citizens of Agrigento. The land, which in Greek times was occupied by residential and public buildings, was used for agriculture. This equilibrium was broken when the city entered the vortex of the Great Acceleration, that is, in the post-Second World War period when the predominantly agricultural economy of Agrigento, based on the cultivation of small plots of land by individual farmers, was supplanted by a form of development based mainly on construction, producing one of the riskiest situations in Italy due to unproductive, illegal and speculative land use [32,37,38].

In 1966 a landslide [39], which affected part of the historic centre of Agrigento, showed that the urban overload, in many ways illegal, carried out between the 1950s and 1960s [40] had exceeded the carrying capacity of the soil. This distorted form of economic development

"has taken on the forms of parasitic speculation which have reached an aberrant extent in this city; the rights of nature and history have been trampled on, the physical and historical characteristics of our country have been ignored ( ... ). The work was done in such a monstrous way that the landslide that engulfed a third of the City of Temples appeared as an inevitable, indeed coherent, reaction of nature ( ... ) to the way in which its laws have been ignored or trampled on" [41], p. 58; author's translation.

The calamitous event, unexpected but perhaps foreseeable, changed the course of the history of the Valley: the Italian governmen<sup>t</sup> subjected the area to archaeological and landscape constraints. The limitations on indiscriminate uses of the territory and construction have safeguarded the territory from the risk of succumbing to the speculative and dissipative uses of the predatory Anthropocene.

The constraints cover both the areas involved in the archaeological finds and the surrounding agricultural landscape for a total of approximately 1450 ha. The coexistence of the archaeological constraints with the landscape constraints affirms the unity of a cultural heritage in which art and nature are inseparably intertwined and recalls the need to safeguard and restore every historicised element of the territory as an inseparable whole.

In 1997, the Valley of the Temples was declared to be the cultural heritage of humanity and was included in the World Heritage List (WHL) of UNESCO; it is one of the largest

archaeological sites currently registered, with a total area of 2803 ha (including boundaries and buffer zones) (Figure 5).

**Figure 5.** Boundaries of the area of the Valley of the Temples registered in the WHL of UNESCO and the buffer zone.

> The effect produced by the constraints became evident in the long term, when the difference in quality between the protected area and the surroundings became visible. Outside the constrained area, the transformation processes continued to consume land and resources at breakneck speed without producing wealth. For over thirty years, the local population has refused the constraints because they were experienced as an imposition from above. Since the end of the 20th century, however, local institutions and the population have begun to manifest a desire to culturally re-appropriate the Valley, to take care of it as the noblest and most important part of the territory [42].

> To promote the safeguarding, management, conservation and defence of its archaeological and landscape heritage and to promote better usability for scientific, social, economic and tourism purposes, the Region of Sicily enacted Regional Law n. 20/2000 for the establishment of the *Archaeological and Landscape Park of the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento*. With the establishment of the Park, an innovative form of cultural heritage managemen<sup>t</sup> was inaugurated, experimenting for the first time with new methods of integrated enhancement of archaeological, landscape and agricultural heritage. The Archaeological Park Plan is the guiding tool for this process which aims to enhance the entire territory in its synthesis of archaeology and rural landscape [34,43–48].

> The vast area of the Park today appears as a cultural landscape that has been stratified over the centuries, where archaeological finds mixed with pieces of agricultural landscape

protected by the dense blanket of territorial constraints—have been largely spared from the Great Acceleration [49].

### *4.2. Change in Landscape Ecomosaics*

During the preparation of the Park Plan, a study of the evolution of landscape ecomosaics was produced in order to identify the configurations of the most significant landscape elements for defining urban planning choices.

The evolution was evaluated on the basis of the comparison between the ecomosaics of the area in 1955 and in 2002. Territorial biopotentiality (or biological territorial capacity, BTC, which measures the degree of relative metabolic capacity and the degree of relative antithermal maintenance of the main ecosystems, expressed in Mcal/m2/year) [50] was used as an indicator for estimating the degree of equilibrium of the territorial areas, which allowed for the comparison of ecosystems and landscapes both qualitatively and quantitatively, favouring the interpretation of territorial transformations [50]. By relating biomass to the homeostatic capacities of ecosystems, BTC helps to measure the degree of metastability of the ecosystems themselves, or their ability to conserve and maximise the use of energy [51].

The evolution of its ecomosaics has clearly demonstrated that the territory of the Valley of the Temples still preserves ecosystems which, thanks to the constraints, were preserved in a phase prior to the Great Acceleration [52]. A testimony that confirms the authenticity of the landscape is the literary, iconographic and photographic documentation that accompanies the story of the rediscovery of the archaeological site of Akragas by lovers of the landscape and archaeology, starting from the 18th century [29,53].
