We decided to spend our last day back in Catania. Not that there was a lot more to see, but to check that it wasn’t a mirage.
We started at the Porta Garibaldi which is just visible in the distance from the Duomo. Built in 1768 to commemorate the wdding of Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies to Maria Carolina of Habsburg-Lorraine, it was designed in full neo-classical glory by Stefano Ittar and Francesco Battaglia:-
We went to Catania in order to go to the railway station. None of the guidebooks had prepared us for how astonishing the historic centre is – grand, extensive, blackened with age and the use of lava stone, full of dilapidated churches, long axial streets and well preserved squares (the Cadogan Guide describes it as ‘a blackening lava-paved inferno of trash, crime and despair’). The presiding genius is not Gaglieri, but Giovan Battista Vaccarini, who was born in Palermo, trained in Rome under Carlo Fontana and settled in Catania in 1730 where he was responsible for much of the best architecture and town planning.
We began and ended at the Cathedral by Vaccarini:-
We had been planning to have lunch in Scicli yesterday, but went today instead. It’s not quite so ostentatious in its charms, but not without them either. We had lunch by the weirdly overblown Palazzo Beneventano:-
We went back to Mòdica on a grey Saturday because we realised that we had managed to miss the cathedral in Mòdica Alta, the grandest of its buildings and another work attributed to Rosario Gagliardi:-
It was worth going to Mòdica if only for its wonderful chocolate shop, Antico Dolceria Bonaiuto, tucked down an alleyway on the Corso Umberto I:-
Our first glimpse of Ragusa Ibla:-
The Duomo, dedicated, very obviously, to St. George:-
We went this morning on Susie Huxley’s recommendation to Marzamemi, a charming, small, out-of-season fishing port, full of empty restaurants and shops selling tins of tuna, infinitely preferable to Portopalo, our other destination:-
I’m not sure I would recommend the Necropoli at Pantàlica, not least because of its extreme remoteness up a long gorge north of Ferla where one struggles to spot the dark holes in the limestone cliffs which were used as sites of burial from the 13th. century BC:-
We hadn’t particularly planned to stop in Ferla en route to Pantàlica, but were impressed by its three baroque churches. San Sebastiano designed by Michelangelo Di Giacomo and finished in 1741:-
We went up onto the limestone plateau above Noto to Palazzolo Acrèidi, a dusty hilltop town with a grand town square dominated by the church of San Sebastiano:-
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