Archaeologists have made two extraordinary discoveries in the Italian town of Agrigento on Sicily’s southwest coast. During excavations undertaken in March 2025, an international team of researchers led by Professor Monika Trümper and Dr. Thomas Lappi from Freie Universität Berlin uncovered an ancient auditorium that offers unique insight into the education of young citizens of the ancient city. This auditorium, which forms part of an impressive gymnasium, illustrates the importance attached to both intellectual and athletic training during this period. The second significant discovery was two inscribed blocks that reveal details about ancient social life. The ensemble uncovered by the researchers is the only known example of its kind in the western Mediterranean.

The gymnasium was a site in ancient Greek cities where young men would receive physical and scholarly instruction that would prepare them for their future duties as citizens – a sort of a cross between a fitness center and school in modern terms. From the fourth century BCE onward these cities built massive complexes with racetracks, bathing facilities, and spaces where young men could train and study. The city of Agrigento, which was founded around 580 BCE as the largest Greek colony on Sicily, was also home to a gymnasium. This construction had already been acknowledged in previous research to be remarkably vast, as it is currently the only known example of a complex in the western Mediterranean offering 200-meter long racetracks and a large swimming pool.

The existence of this remarkable collection of facilities was confirmed in recent excavations carried out by a team from Freie Universität Berlin in March 2025 in cooperation with the Politecnico di Bari and Parco Archeologico Valle dei Templi di Agrigento and which received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG). The team uncovered an ancient auditorium in the form of a small covered theater with space for about 200 people to sit across eight ascending semicircular rows. When the gymnasium was built in the second century BCE no other gymnasium of the ancient world featured a comparable auditorium. It was only 250–300 years later that a theater-style auditorium was constructed in the large gymnasium in Pergamon in modern-day Turkey. The auditorium in Agrigento opened up to a large room (11 x 23 meters) with benches, which could also be used for intellectual activities such as lessons, presentations, and competitions. This unique ensemble suggests that maintaining a healthy mind was just as important to the patrons of the gymnasium as maintaining a healthy body.

Another sensational discovery awaited the excavation team in the semicircular orchestra of the auditorium where teachers and students once performed before an audience. This is where they found two large blocks inscribed in Greek. The letters were engraved into the white plaster surfaces and highlighted using red paint. The text mentions a gymnasiarch (leading official of the gymnasium) and a person that financed the renovation of the roof of the apodyterium (changing room) from his own funds and dedicated it to Hermes and Heracles, the deities of Greek gymnasia. Even though ancient Agrigento was settled for over 1000 years, very few inscriptions that could provide insights into the city’s social life have been preserved. The style of the lettering suggests that the inscription was engraved in the late first century BCE when Agrigento was firmly under Roman rule. This indicates that despite the change in leadership citizens continued to uphold the Greek language, administrative bodies, and traditions, and that the gymnasium was still used and maintained as the main educational facility for its youth.

Over the course of its 2026 excavation campaign the team hopes to uncover other spaces used for exercise and learning to the north of the auditorium and to find other inscriptions that will allow them to reconstruct life in Agrigento’s ancient gymnasium.

In-depth information about the ongoing excavations in Agrigento: https://www.geschkult.fu-berlin.de/e/klassarch/forschung/projekte/agrigent/index.html