B&B MiraValle Agrigento is just 7 km from the splendid golden beaches of San Leone, the lido of the city of Agrigento.
San Leone is a hamlet and the main lido of Agrigento. It stands on the Akragas point, near the mouth of the Akragas river, also called the San Leone river.
Known as the seaside resort of the City of the Temples, it takes its name from Pope Leo II (682-683), a Sicilian. Originally the site was occupied by the emporium (port) of the Greek city, which was continuously frequented until the Arab period. The emporium was already used by Mycenaean sailors around the middle of the 2nd millennium BC, who mainly stocked up on sulphur and rock salt.
Near San Leone, and precisely at Cannatello, are the remains of a settlement-emporium, discovered in the early years of the 20th century by Angelo Mosso, dating back to the 14th-12th century BC. It is considered the most representative site, together with Thapsos, of the Middle Bronze Age culture in Sicily. The excavation delimited the emerging part of the chiefdom, that is the fortified part where the ruling family resided and where the inhabitants of the surroundings took refuge during enemy raids. The Sican village appears bounded by a powerful double ring of curvilinear walls about 8 metres thick. The inner ring is the oldest and suffered a violent fire; the second took the place of the first.
Inside are the remains of circular and rectilinear huts. Three successive phases of settlement have been recognised. In the area, Aegean-Cypriot ceramics were found, along with an urn containing four spearheads, two swords and a bronze axe. With this discovery, the hypothesis of an Aegean-Cypriot contribution in the 13th century BC in the marina area of Agrigentogained ground. This area was already frequented from the early Bronze Age by the Aegean-Cypriots, who obtained sulphur from the mines of Monte Grande, perhaps the oldest sulphur mine in the western world. Sulphur was a precious mineral in antiquity, a true catalyst of human progress, as it was useful for reaching the melting temperature of metals.
It was also used to purify and disinfect. The emporium of Cannatello functioned, like Monte Grande in the 18th century BC, as a loading port for sulphur, rock salt and probably also bitumen, which abounds among the sedimentary rocks of the area, for the Aegean-Cypriot sailors, who used this beach as an intermediate base for the routes connecting Cyprus and the Aegean with North Africa and the Sardinian and Iberian west. For the same function, in the 7th-6th century BC the emporium of Akragas at the river mouth would be used, and centuries later the loading port of Girgenti, that is today's Porto Empedocle.
San Leone is a popular seaside resort thanks to the long beaches that surround it, the dunes and the Maddalusa, and its proximity to the Valley of the Temples.
Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
™