There is a profound, almost silent weight to certain photographs. While my previous post explored the domestic warmth of a 1906 Warwickshire riverbank, today’s piece from my collection takes us much further back in time—and into a much more stark, monumental atmosphere. This is a real-photo postcard of the Temple of Heracles (Tempio di Ercole) in Agrigento, Sicily.
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| Temple of Heracles, Agrigento, Sicily, Italy |
The Visual: A Forest of Stone
The front of the postcard features a striking sepia image of eight fluted Doric columns standing defiant against a pale, sprawling sky. This is the southern side of the temple, a detail noted in three languages—Italian, German, and English—on the reverse.
The Temple of Heracles is widely considered the oldest of the temples in the famous Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, dating back to the late 6th century BC. When this photo was taken, those stones had already weathered two and a half millennia of Mediterranean sun, salt, and conflict. The rugged texture of the calcarenite stone is palpable in this high-contrast print; you can see the deep grooves of the fluting and the massive, heavy capitals that once supported a colossal entablature. The foreground is a chaotic tumble of original masonry, reminding us that what stands today is a partial reconstruction—a "re-anastylosis" performed in the 1920s to bring these eight pillars back to the vertical.
The Provenance: 1937 and the "Serie Artistica"
Turning the card over reveals a wealth of historical context that is just as fascinating as the ruins themselves. Unlike the chatty, handwritten note from Emily in my Leamington post, this card remains unposted and pristine, serving as a formal "souvenir" of a specific era in Italian history.
The vertical text along the left edge identifies this as an "Edizione del Museo Civico" (Civic Museum Edition). Crucially, it is dated 1937 - XV. The "XV" refers to the fifteenth year of the Era Fascista (Fascist Era), a dating system used in Italy at the time. During the 1930s, there was a massive state-driven effort to excavate and promote Italy's classical past as a symbol of national strength and continuity.
The card was produced by Fotocelere in Turin, a company renowned for high-quality "Vera Fotografia" (True Photography) postcards. This wasn't a cheap mass-produced lithograph; it was a silver halide print designed to capture the fine detail of the stone, sold as part of an "Artistic Series" to sophisticated travellers visiting the Valley of the Temples.
The Valley of the Temples
Agrigento (ancient Akragas) was once one of the most powerful cities of the Magna Graecia. The Temple of Heracles was nearly as large as the Parthenon in Athens. Imagine these pillars covered in white stucco, painted with vibrant reds and blues, standing as a beacon for sailors approaching the Sicilian coast.
By the time this postcard was printed in 1937, the site had become a centrepiece of the "Grand Tour" for a new generation of motorized tourists. While the world was on the brink of another devastating global conflict, these columns stood as they do now: remnants of a civilization that thought itself eternal, reduced to a beautiful, haunting skeletal form.
Why Collect "Museum Editions"?
I love this card because it represents the intersection of ancient history and modern propaganda. It is a museum-sanctioned view of the past, captured with the best photographic technology of the 1930s. It lacks a personal message, but its "official" nature tells us how the world viewed these ruins just before the outbreak of World War II. It is a snapshot of how we curate and package "the ancient" for the modern traveller.
