Porto Empedocle is Agrigento's port, about 8 kilometres south on the coast, and it has the honest, working feel of an actual harbour rather than a tourist destination. The ferry to Lampedusa and the other Pelagian Islands departs from here, and the docks have a serious shipping traffic that keeps the town anchored to real economic life. The harbour promenade is pleasant enough for a walk, with the old watch tower at its end.
The town's other claim to notice is literary: it was the birthplace of Luigi Pirandello (1867), the playwright and novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934. His birthplace, the Villa Girasole in Caos (a suburb of what was then Girgenti), is now a museum. His ashes are buried under a pine tree in the garden, as he requested in his will, in a characteristically theatrical gesture.