> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://thegreekfiles.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Three Campaigns, One Unnamed Building: Roman Frescoes Beside Akragas's Assembly Hall - URL: https://thegreekfiles.com/three-campaigns-one-unnamed-building-roman-frescoes-beside-akragas-assembly-hall/ - Published: 2026-10-07T14:28:08.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-08T12:06:08.000Z - Description: Three campaigns in, the Normale's Agrigento dig yields first-century BC fresco fragments beside the ancient assembly hall — and a central question about the building's identity that the announcement leaves open. - Author: J E Cowie - Tags: News *Above: The ekklesiasterion at the Valley of the Temples — the assembly hall of ancient Akragas, where the Normale's new finds lie just to the south. (Image: Ekklesiasterion, Agrigento — Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons))* The Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa has been digging in Agrigento since 2020\. This was its third "school" campaign on the buildings of the Poggio di San Nicola. Its 6 October announcement is headlined as the remains of frescoes from an ancient domus, but the text underneath is more cautious: the team still doesn't know whether the building was a house at all. That is the case as it stands. What the team under Professor Gianfranco Adornato recovered from the site, a little to the south of the ekklesiasterion (the semicircular seating where the free citizens of ancient Akragas gathered to deliberate), is a set of fragments: polychrome plaster, architectural elements, and stucco, all dating to the first century BC. The plaster is classifiable in the second and third styles of Roman wall painting — the same decorative fashions that survive on the walls of Pompeii. The columns and the portico, Adornato says, make it "very probably" a large peristyle (translated from the Italian, as are all quotations from the Normale here). What the peristyle belonged to is the question the announcement leaves open. A private domus of imposing size, or a public colonnaded terrace connected to the Roman temple? In Adornato's words, as published by the Normale: *Da precisare nel corso dello studio* — to be clarified in the course of the study. That deferral is the story. Three campaigns in, the public gets fragments and a fork in the road. ## Assembly hall, council chamber, theatre The Poggio di San Nicola is, in the Normale's announcement, "a strategic area, at the centre of the ancient city," marked by civic and assembly buildings: the ekklesiasterion, the bouleuterion (the council chamber), and the theatre. The announcement calls it a key place for understanding "the transformations of the institutions at the moment of transition under Roman influence." The layered occupation is the point. The Greek assembly hall sits there. The Roman building — house or portico — was erected beside it when, as the Normale puts it, "Sicily was already fully under Roman domination." And in the same area, the team investigated the apse of a small early Christian basilica, a structure that earlier scholarship had read as an exedra, a semicircular recess. Adornato and Giuseppe Rignanese published a study of that structure in 2025 in the *Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa*. One hill. Greek assembly, Roman building, early Christian church. The sequence is clear. The details of the middle layer are not. ![A wide view of the Valley of the Temples archaeological park at Agrigento, showing the Doric temple ](https://thegreekfiles.com/content/images/2026/10/shot2_a-wide-view-of-the-valley-of-the-temples.jpg) The Valley of the Temples at Agrigento, a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1997\. (Image: Valle dei Templi, Agrigento — Cayambe, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons)) ## What the announcement does not say The Normale's text does not state how many rooms the building had. It does not name a commissioner. It does not give a date of abandonment. It does not say whether the painted fragments are substantial enough for any panel to be reconstructed. All of that, as La Brújula Verde notes, depends on the study that is only now beginning. The campaign itself began on 7 September and runs until 9 October 2026, as part of a seasonal school organised under EELISA, the European network of universities to which the Normale belongs. Students, doctoral candidates, and early-career researchers from Italian and international universities took part, among them the Polytechnic University of Madrid, Istanbul Technical University, PSL University in Paris, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The group's skills spanned archaeology, data science, patristics, and literary sources. The programme included seminars and an intensive course in ceramics in archaeology, under the MERITA project. The archaeological park of the Valley of the Temples is directed by Roberto Sciarratta. The Normale's find is one piece of a wider season of excavation by Italian and foreign universities at the site. ## The question that matters The distinction between a private house and a public portico is not academic. A house of imposing size over the old civic space and a portico attached to a temple would say different things about the city under Rome. The Normale notes that the adjacent ekklesiasterion had lost its public functions — which is itself a data point; according to the local archaeological museum, cited by La Brújula Verde, the seating was filled in after the Roman conquest and a small temple on a high platform, the so-called Oratory of Phalaris, of disputed date, was built on top. Rome took Agrigento in 210 BC, during the Second Punic War. The city had been a Greek colony since the sixth century BC. What the Roman building beside the ekklesiasterion was, and who it served, is still to be established; until then, as La Brújula Verde puts it, both readings remain possible. ## Sources Adornato, G. and Rignanese, G. (2025) \[study of the early Christian basilica on the Poggio di San Nicola, earlier read as an exedra\], *Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa* (as reported by La Brújula Verde, 6 October 2026). Carvajal, G. (2026) 'Roman Frescoes Found Beside the Spot Where Greeks Once Voted in Agrigento', La Brújula Verde, 6 October 2026, available at: [https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/10/roman-frescoes-found-beside-the-spot-where-greeks-once-voted-in-agrigento/](https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2026/10/roman-frescoes-found-beside-the-spot-where-greeks-once-voted-in-agrigento/?ref=thegreekfiles.com) (Accessed: 7 October 2026). Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2026) 'Resti di affreschi di una antica Domus dallo scavo scuola ad Agrigento', NormaleNews, 6 October 2026, available at: [https://normalenews.sns.it/resti-di-affreschi-di-una-antica-domus-dallo-scavo-scuola-ad-agrigento](https://normalenews.sns.it/resti-di-affreschi-di-una-antica-domus-dallo-scavo-scuola-ad-agrigento?ref=thegreekfiles.com) (Accessed: 7 October 2026).