The theatre faces the sea: nine wedges of seating cut into a soft marl that crumbles between your fingers, now sheltered under a modern canopy because the stone cannot take rain. The city that built it was called Minoa, an outpost founded by settlers from Selinus around the middle of the 6th century BC. It became Heraclea about 510 BC, when Euryleon, the only survivor among the leaders of the Spartan Dorieus' Sicilian venture, seized it. For centuries the river Platani, the ancient Halycus, divided Carthaginian Sicily from the lands of Syracuse: the treaty of 405 BC drew the border exactly here. Rome inherited the town at the end of the Punic wars; in 131 BC the praetor Publius Rupilius planted a colony to repopulate it after the First Servile War, and shortly after the middle of the 1st century BC the excavation record falls silent.
What to see
The theatre is the reason for the trip. Built between the end of the 5th and the 4th century BC, its cavea is divided into nine sectors of ten rows each and opens to the south, against Vitruvius' advice and in favour of the view. It never had a masonry stage building: in the orchestra you can still see the sockets for the cables of a movable wooden platform, put up and taken down for every performance. Systematic digging began in 1950 under Ernesto De Miro, and the porous local stone eventually forced the shelter that now roofs the seats.
Above the theatre spreads the quarter of Hellenistic and Roman houses, laid out in insulae separated by parallel streets: thresholds, wells and courtyards are all legible. Of the city wall, raised between the late 6th and the late 4th century BC over some six kilometres, stretches survive, and to the north-east eight square towers can still be made out in the ground. The Antiquarium beside the entrance holds pottery and votive figurines from the town and its cemeteries, and it puts names back on the empty rooms outside.
Visiting
You come off the SS 115 between Agrigento and Sciacca: after the Montallegro junction turn towards the sea and follow the signs to the car park on top of the promontory. The site is fenced and ticketed, and the Antiquarium is included. An hour and a half covers theatre, houses and walls without rushing. The paths are unpaved and almost entirely without shade, so closed shoes, water and a hat. Below, the white cliff of Capo Bianco drops onto the beach and the pine wood, a few minutes away by car from the same junction.
Our editors' tip
Climb to the top row of the theatre and sit down: from up there the sea fills the whole field of view and you understand why they turned the cavea the wrong way round. Then go down to the beach under Capo Bianco, where the water stays shallow for tens of metres and the pines behind the sand are the only shade of the day. Check the closing time before you set off: in winter the gate shuts early and the access road has no lighting.