These remarks will not appear superficial to those who know the great work of Giuseppe Pancrazi,1 in which Sicilian antiquities are explained, because he reports very little or not at all on the architecture of the temples and buildings he has reproduced as copper engravings. Wise scholars do not like to depart from their fixed track. For this reason Canon Mazzocchi, one of the foremost scholars of our time, in his merely scholarly treatise on Paestum, which together with other works is included with his explanation of the Hercules tablets, passes over in silence the temples at Paestum as though they did not exist, but I shall mention them in passing.

Giusseppe Pancrazi, of the Theatine order, is still living in Cortona, in Tuscany, his homeland, but outside his order and remote from the world, because of feebleness of mind, the cause of which is attributed to the miscalculations he had made in disputing the costs of his work, miscalculations concerning the generosity of those Englishmen to whom he had dedicated the copper plates. This was because, lacking experience of the world, he had taken the very idea of this nation to be synonymous with magnanimity.

His intention was to make a large extensive work, and for this purpose he had arranged for the supposed letters of Phalaris to be printed in their entirety and made them the basis for his history of the city of Akragas, called Agrigentum by the Romans, and now known as Agrigento.