Archaeological ruins are rocks artfully placed and artfully collapsed. Since the Romantics, they have been sites of imagination where we conjure the past. At the Valley of the Temples, which has occupied a ridge outside the city of Agrigento, Italy, for 2,500 years, visitors come to admire the Doric columns and see the stunning Greek structures that have stood through weather and war. What they see is the skeleton of a long-gone society. Tour guides and didactic panels describe what life was once like, and recreated wood machines sprinkled throughout…
