The museum is located outside the modern city on the San Nicola hill, on the site of a medieval monastery that was first Cistercian and then Franciscan, incorporating some of its appropriately restored structures. Designed by the architect and museographer Franco Minissi, it was inaugurated in 1967 and named after Pietro Griffo, superintendent of antiquities in Agrigento, who tenaciously sought and oversaw its construction.
Third National Archaeological Museum of Sicily, after Palermo and Syracuse, it collects historical and archaeological evidence, from prehistory to the early Middle Ages, of the ancient civilizations that arrived and settled in the central-southern part of the region. Transferred to the jurisdiction of the Sicilian region in the 1970s, it displays finds from excavations in the territory of Agrigento and the provinces of Agrigento, Caltanissetta, and Enna, together with the archaeological collection of the Agrigento Civic Museum.
Its 17 rooms offer two itineraries, which can also be visited independently of each other: the first (rooms I-XI) displays artifacts from the city of Akragas-Agrigentum alone, while the second (rooms XII-XVII) displays artifacts from the territories of Agrigento, Caltanissetta, and Enna.
