Sunday, 17 November 2024

Palermo’s Teatro Massimo is an ideal place to see opera on a grand scale, at modest prices

Opera is a global art form, with more than 1,000 major companies around the world and grand opera houses scattered across every continent but Antarctica. These days the lead singers are as likely to be from Africa or China as Europe. Italy, however, still has quite a proprietary relationship with opera.

It was invented here, after all, and many of the favourites in the repertoire are sung in Italian. Italians feel a sense of ownership when it comes to the most popular arias; my grandfather used to belt out Puccini like other people did pop songs. Even small towns in Italy have opera houses. In the cities, they’re usually an architectural centrepiece, on par with … and often next to … palaces. The biggest of them all is in Palermo.

The Teatro Massimo is the largest opera house in Italy, and the third largest in Europe after Paris and Vienna. When it opened in the 1890s it was intended to hold up to 3,000 people in its seven tiers and ground floor. Despite the cavernous proportions, it’s reckoned to have perfect acoustics. These days a desire for more personal space and fire safety has reduced audience size to just 1,381. That’s 875 fewer than London’s Royal Opera house.

The smaller audience lets you luxuriate in more elbow room, and the company here still puts on productions on a traditionally grand scale. Yet tickets at Teatro Massimo are far cheaper than in London. We splurged on £120 a ticket for amazing seats in the stalls (the ground floor of the auditorium). We were on the horizontal aisle that divided the front and back blocks of seating, so had no heads in front of us for 10 feet and the ability to stretch our legs full length during the production. Instead of your typical flip-bottom theatrical seating, the stalls are all individual bucket-shaped arm chairs in classic style with generous upholstery. I’ve never been more comfortable, and rarely had a better view, in an opera house. The same location in London would cost more than £250, and in our recent experience any seats cheaper than £170 put your so high up, or give you such restricted sightlines, they’re not worth buying. At Teatro Massimo, had we wanted to spend less, I could have bought seats with clear views in the lower tiers for £60.

It’s the escalating price of London tickets, paired with the increasingly streamlined sets and choruses there, that has us looking to the continent for more of our opera experiences. The Teatro Massimo didn’t disappoint. In addition to those comfy, excellent value seats we got an excellent production of Turandot. None of those modern, cost-slashing stagings here. We were served up architecturally impressive sets, dazzling costumes and a full chorus.

Admittedly, I was somewhat perplexed by the set design. Turandot is set in Ancient China, something conveyed perfectly in this production by a chorus in identical, earth-coloured uniforms standing in seried ranks in pits built into the stage floor. Just like the terra cotta warriors. But the architecture told us we were in the ancient Middle East, with double-bull columns framing the palace. The Emperor was dressed as the Shah of Iran, circa 1950, while the bloodthirsty princess rocked a Grace Kelly in ballgowns vibe. Our victorious prince at least dressed Chinese, though more Kyng Fu monk that romantic hero. Oddest of all were the three advisors, each wearing a different shockingly bright primary colour and dressed in a series of hip hop mogul designs.

Some little girls turned up occasionally, obviously projections of Turandot’s memories, implying that her willingness to send all of her failed suitors to execution was the result of childhood sexual abuse rather than Puccini’s story of some wronged ancestress. Later, the production had Turandot seeing a vision of the slave girl she’d tortured to death as a trigger point to her character transformation at the end of the opera.

I don’t think this mash-up of concepts was entirely successful. They were just trying too many disparate things and probably would have delivered a stronger whole if they’d stuck to one big idea. But it was great to look at, all of the performers were solid and it’s always a thrill to hear “Nessun Dorma” performed live, in its original context. Most memorably in this production, the little girls and the ghost suggested what was going on in Turandot’s head, thereby giving some sort of logic to one of the most ludicrous endings in all of opera. Puccini might not have written it, but it worked.

Beyond the production itself, part of the fun of going to a new opera house is exploring the building. While its amphitheatre is a classically grand space .. all white and gold with plush red upholstery and frolicking gods painting on the ceiling … the foyers are actually a bit gloomy. The colour schemes out here are browns, beiges, dusky pinks and dark greys. The great hall you enter upon coming through the front doors actually feels like they’ve brought Palermo architecture in, but toned down the colours. The marble walls, with their engaged columns and architectural details, felt like the exteriors of the city’s palazzi, and this enormous space like a piazza between them. A browse through online photos indicates there are lots of interior spaces we didn’t see, including a rather spectacular rotunda that I suspect may be under the dome up top. In hindsight, it’s probably worth taking one of the tours of the building during the day to see more than you do as an audience member.



Downstairs is a brighter, more modern and very elegant cocktail bar, but by the time you get served you won’t have long to enjoy the atmosphere before you have to swig your drink and return to your seats. Locals clearly knew the fastest route to the bar and headed there the moment the curtain fell for intermission. Next time, so will we.

We discovered there’s also a restaurant outside, but within the area closed off from the piazza beyond by ornate railings. On a return visit, I’d go early and enjoy my aperitivo there before the show.

The neighbourhood around the opera is highly attuned to the crowds pouring in and out of here every night, with scores of cafes facing the building and lining the little lanes leading away from it. Our B&B, L’Olivella, was just 200 metres down one of these … the Via Bara All’Olivella. It’s a great place to stay for the opera and the street between it and Teatro Massimo is lined with restaurants.

At less than three hours’ flight time from Heathrow, Palermo offers opera lovers an easy weekend alternative to London. While flights will add to your costs, opera tickets and food will be less expensive and accommodation is reasonable. Head to their website for a long-range view of productions and get planning.

For another operatic excursion in Italy, see my article about our visit to the Verona Opera Festival last summer. It was a much weirder performance, but still a great experience.

Tuesday, 12 November 2024

To see Palermo’s greatest treasures, go to church

Palermo is a terrible city for ABC Tourists.

The letters stand for “another bloody church”. Back when my mother worked in travel as a sideline to teaching art history, tour guides used the label to describe an impatient sightseer who, having seen one example of one type of thing, ticked it off his to do list and was bored to see any more. Anyone satisfied with a single church may want to give the Sicilian capital a wide berth. Not only do religious buildings dominate the city, but many of the greatest artistic and architectural treasures are within them. Indeed, if you really want to see the best of Palermo, you’ll be spending more time in front of altars than a priest during Holy Week.

Any first-time visitor should prioritise the Palatine Chapel within the Royal Palace and the Cathedral at Monreale. Both are jaw-dropping masterpieces that mash-up Byzantine Christian mosaics with Arabic architecture. I’d seen them (and written about them) before, however, and wanted to dig into the next tier of masterpieces.

The most memorable from my long list was the Chiesa del Gesù, more frequently called the Casa Professa by locals. In Dr. Who there’s an ongoing gag about newcomers being in shock when they realise how much bigger the hero’s ship is on the inside than out. There’s a similar sort of disconnect here, but the shock comes between the extremely plain exterior and the eye-wateringly opulent interiors. Anyone who’s visited a few Italian Jesuit churches knows that when you combine those priests with Baroque architecture you usually end up with something completely over the top. This may be the most outrageous I’ve seen yet.

The church’s interiors are encrusted with multi-coloured marbles. They aren’t just inlaid. Many project from the walls’ surfaces. Fruit cascades in abundance. Birds and animals stick body parts out, putti (baby angels) cavort everywhere. At higher levels, near life-sized plaster figures act out scenes from the bible. Or just swan about joyously. This isn’t a place for quiet contemplation or gloomy thoughts. This decorative scheme provokes a giddy, overwhelmed joy.
I found myself wandering about giggling with nervous laughter as one viewpoint became more outrageous than the next. This place makes St. Peter’s look like streamlined Scandì design. Let your eye rest on a single square meter … a border of three-dimensional fruit in semi-precious stone, the face of a loving angel, the lush explosion of a vase of flowers rendered in inlaid marble … and you’ll marvel at the craftsmanship. Taken all together, it’s almost too much. Despite the risk of overdose, don’t miss the particularly opulent scenes in the tight space behind the main altar, which would have been for the eyes of priests alone, or the treasures kept in the museum though the door there. Sumptuous altar cloths encrusted with tiny red coral beads are almost as three dimensional as the church outside. You’d need to layer on a lot of bling not to get upstaged by your surroundings while saying mass here. The sparkling array of religious accessories here shows how they attempted it. 

The extraordinarily lifelike plasterwork here is by the Serpotta family, a name that will dominate your experience of Baroque churches in Palermo. Giacomo is probably Sicily’s greatest sculptor. He appears to have never left the island, but rather asked travellers to bring back books and sketches of what was happening in Rome and beyond. He, with brother and son, then interpreted them for his local market. His versions are not just better than anything in Sicily, but on par with anything Bernini created in Rome or the virtuoso Asam family produced in Munich

To get the full impact of his talent you need to seek out his oratories, smaller private chapels where his plasterwork dominates the decorative scheme rather than just enhancing it. The most famous is the Oratorio di Santa Cita. Here’s another mismatch of inside and out. The small road to the chapel is dingy. The building’s exterior … like so much of Palermo … is covered in graffiti. To get to the chapel you climb a plain flight of steps with a quiet, peaceful courtyard garden to your right. Even the anti-room where you buy your ticket is fairly plain. Then you duck through a curtain and, bam!, you’re smacked upside the head with the sheer force of art.

The walls are crowded with impressive figures, from flocks of those trademark Serpotta putti to statuesque women embodying the mysteries of the rosary. Exquisitely rendered cascades of fruit, foliage and flowers surround them. It’s as heavily decorated as the Casa Professa, but it’s all white and flooded with light from big windows two thirds of the way up the walls, which makes it a more soothing place. 

Until you turn around and check out the back wall. It’s hard to feel soothed when confronted with a detailed recreation of the naval battle of Lepanto so lifelike you can practically hear the cannon fire and men screaming as they tumble overboard. Here, the putti swarm around piles of armour and weapons. It seems an unusual motif for a religious building unless you know that Lepanto was the point at which European powers definitively stopped Islamic expansion into Europe. It was also considered a specifically Catholic victory at a time when the wars of the Reformation were raging, so a nice bit of one-upsmanship against those irritating Protestants. Many consider this to be the Serpotta family’s masterpiece.

A short stroll down a nearby cross street brings you to the Oratory of San Domenico. (You can buy a combination ticket to see both, and they’re so close to each other it’s foolish not to.) Though the room is almost the same size as Santa Cita, and it also features life-sized plaster women representing various religious ideas around its walls, San Domenico has an entirely different feel. The plasterwork is broken up by moody paintings. There are more distinctive architectural features in the plaster like towering columns and great swags of drapery, and there’s a fair amount of gold gilding. It’s heavier, more serious and more masculine than Santa Cita, and feels more like something out of the English Baroque than the Palermitan. That may have something to do with the altarpiece, which isn’t an ornate tower of carved marble but a painting. A painting by Sir Anthony Van Dyck … someone so completely embedded in the story of English art it came as a real surprise to encounter him here.
There are three more Serpotta oratories in Palermo and I could have happily continued my “compare and contrast” exploration across them all, but I needed to plunge backwards in time.

Though the Palatine Chapel and the Cathedral in Monreale are the greatest examples of this city’s unique Arab-Norman culture, there are two more churches a stones’ throw from the famous Quattro Canti that are worthy runners up. 

San Cataldo is tiny, and all about the architecture. It looks more mosque than church, with its three distinctive red domes and Arabic arches, but it never served an Islamic function. It was build after the Normans took over from the Arabs, but inspired by their style. It did host a post office in the 18th century, by which time almost all of its interior decoration had been stripped out. Though it’s been restored, it hasn’t been re-decorated, so you can fully admire its magnificent bones. Go here first, for a better appreciation of what happens when you put flesh on that infrastructure.
Just next door is Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio. Its facade is a rather horrible hotch-potch of Arab-Norman, high gothic and Baroque, with none of the successive renovators making any attempt to integrate their work with the past. But, like so much in Palermo, it’s not the outside you’re here to look at. Inside, the Arab-Norman bones are intact and they retain most of their covering of magnificent mosaics. Angels and saints glimmer against an expanse of gold. The Virgin Mary dazzles in blue. Stars sparkle from a lapis night sky. Flowers and foliage twine across archways. Near the entrance, Roger II … the father of Sicily’s greatest age … has himself shown being crowned by Jesus. It’s an elegant bit of PR, considering that the pope was dragging his heels acknowledging Roger’s promotion from duke. When in doubt, go up the management chain.

The Admiral’s Church, as it’s known in English, didn’t manage to retain all of its original mosaics. About a third of the decoration, including the high altar, is Baroque. About the best you can say of it is that it isn’t intrusive. The colours and placement of figures work with what was there before so they fade into background. Though this isn’t a large church, plan on plenty of time here, moving from chair to chair to look up and appreciate the mosaic artistry.

A short stroll up the Via Vittorio Emanuele, one of the cross streets of the Quattro Canti, brings you to what you might think would be the most impressive church in town: the cathedral. It starts well. Unlike the Admiral’s bad exterior mash-up, the outside of this church is a wonderfully delicate blend of Arab-Norman features and later enhancements. That’s aided by an enormous piazza-cum-garden which sets off the architecture with swaying palm trees. Through the door, however, comes one of the few church interiors in Palermo that can actually be called boring. It’s big. It’s white. It has a bit of undistinguished statuary. There’s nothing memorable here and it looks like thousands of churches up and down the Italian peninsula.

Unless you turn left. A bit like heading that direction when boarding an airplane, all the important people are tucked away here. The cathedral houses the tombs of the Norman dynasty that made Sicily the artistic and intellectual showplace of Europe in the 12th and early 13th centuries. 

Here’s Roger II, the one you just saw being crowned by Jesus, and his grandson Frederick II. The younger man was known in his lifetime as stupor mundi, or wonder of the world, and was also Holy Roman Emperor. Here you’ll also find Frederick’s mother Constance, who did a remarkable job holding her father’s empire together … including abandoning the peaceful convent life she preferred to marry the German ruler, buried here beside her, and give birth to an heir when she was almost 40. Frederick’s wife, also a Constance, rounds out this fascinating group. Older than her superstar husband, Constance ruled Sicily for years while Frederick sorted out his more troublesome German inheritance. 

Given the lavishly decorated churches and palaces these people left behind, their tombs are almost austere. Massive dark marble sarcophagi sit beneath canopies held up by gracious columns. There’s a bit of mosaic work beneath the canopies and on the columns to add some colour but it’s mostly austere and august. Very ancient Roman, actually. That seems appropriate for people who thought they were establishing an Italian empire that would last generations. Sadly, it didn’t make it past Frederick’s children. But the tombs remain as a somber testament to the glories of Sicily’s greatest age.

There are 84 churches in Palermo before you dip into oratorios, private chapels and other religious architecture. It’s enough to overwhelm even the biggest architecture nerd, much less the ABC tourist. If you can get to these four examples, however, plus the Palatine Chapel and the Cathedral at Monreale, I promise you variety, beauty and wonder that will captivate anyone.

Sunday, 3 November 2024

Sicilian Food Part Three: A mash-up of cooking school, palace peeping and literary greatness

My husband and I have been including cooking classes in our holidays since our second trip together. We both love food, and have always found cooking workshops a fantastic way to understand more about a place while honing our culinary skills. It seems we’ve been trend setters. What was once a relatively scarce option has moved on to the must-do list of modern travellers. Travel sites now overflow with options.

I’m not sure the expansion has been for the better.

The explosion in cooking experiences brings a host of instructors who may or may not have any real credentials, demonstrating a few recipes in spaces that may or may not be appropriately kitted out for a lesson. Many classes appear pitched to people who don’t cook much, and offer the same handful of dishes that everyone knows for the country in question. You’ll find the same pizza and tiramisu-making combo across Italy, for example, even though the first is a Neapolitan dish, the second from the northeast, and passionate locals would much rather have you eating their regional specialties. Despite the proliferation of options, I think it’s harder these days to find a really excellent experience than it was when cooking classes were relatively rare.

Extensive web research, however, can still reveal real jewels. This year it led me to the Duchess of Palma, Nicoletta Lanzi Tomasi, and her remarkable day of instruction, stories and good food in Palermo. 

This isn’t just a cooking class but an all-around experience. You start with a stroll through the market as the duchess explains the deep traditions of shopping here. Then it’s back to her family palazzo by the sea, a setting which immediately elevates this above your standard class. After a morning of cooking together you sit down to eat what you’ve produced in the palace’s dining room. The delights don’t end there. You’ll walk off some of that lunch touring the palazzo, once the home of Prince Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampadusa, author of what’s arguably the greatest of all Italian novels, The Leopard. Food, literature, elegant dining, art and architecture all in one day. I was in heaven.

The day starts in the courtyard of the palazzo on the edge of the Kalsa district. The impressive line of palaces of which this is one were built on old Spanish defensive walls facing the sea, stretching south from the famous Porta Felice. (Comprised of two baroque gatehouses, on either side of a road that forms the main spine of old Palermo and famously frame the setting sun, the Porta is amongst the most iconic symbols of Palermo.) You don’t linger long there, however, as you’ll be bundled into cars and whisked to Capo market. While Palermo’s other markets, Vucciria and Ballarò, have skewed more towards street food stalls and bars, Capo is still pretty much exclusively a functioning market for the locals with stall owners selling fruit, veg, fish, meat, and specialty ingredients. The duchess explained how there’s a sense of ownership between stall holders and their customers. In the Sicilian language you would say that you belong to each other. Vendors get to know you and your needs, and … once you become a regular customer … they would be mortally offended if you shopped anywhere else. You don’t handle the wares here; you tell the vendors what you want and they select for you. Meaning, of course, the regular customers will get the best.

Capo lies along a fairly dingy street overhung by 18th century buildings, their balconies festooned with laundry, football flags, plants and whatever doesn’t fit into the flats inside. Even on a sunny day, it feels like most of the light radiates from the beauties for sale, not from the sun above. Luscious shades of pink glowing atop bright white beds of ice in the fish stalls. Jars of honey catching and reflecting light like golden lanterns. Fruit and veg in every colour of the rainbow, all seeming far larger and more vibrant than what finally makes it to supermarket shelves in England.

Ingredients procured, we were bundled back into the cars waiting at the end of the street and returned to the palace. We went in a side door (the grand staircase was saved for our exit) and followed the Duchess through a warren of rooms. Some were small and functional, others more generously-proportioned sitting rooms. None particularly palatial in size but all furnished … elegantly but with a casual feel … with layers of art and antiques you only get from the accretion of many generations. There’s a passage in The Leopard where the young lovers go exploring in the family’s old palace and lose themselves in the bewildering labyrinth of rooms. I felt like I’d stepped not just into the author’s house, but into his novel.

We’d taken this route to get to the garden, a terrace about 50 feet wide and stretching the whole length of the palace, so densely planted with semi-tropical trees and vines it seemed impossible that we were in a big city. It also helps, of course, that the views from here are of the seafront and the mountains framing the northwest of Palermo’s bay. Traditional Sicilian tiles marked paths between the beds and water splashed into fountains occupied by rather majestic tortoises.

You could very happily curl up here with a good book for hours. But we were here to harvest herbs and edible flowers for lunch. The duchess established the format for the cooking session here, assigning different roles to individuals so the whole group was multi-tasking. It’s worth noting here that this is not a cooking class where each student does everything at his or her own workspace under the instruction of the leader. You may be in one room juicing oranges while someone else is peeling potatoes and another classmate is browning off onions. You’ll get recipes at the end, but if you’re looking for the kind of class that gets you “hands on” with every step of a recipe, this may make you a bit anxious.

The menu was seasonal (more aubergines, naturally) and of the region, though it turns out the duchess is originally from Venice. This made her stories even more interesting to me, as she reflected on the dramatic differences from her native region that she discovered when she first arrived here.

We started with polpette di melanzane, an aubergine-based take on meatballs perfect if you have an abundance of that purple vegetable … which seems to include everyone in Sicily in September … and an excellent vegetarian starter. You simply roast the whole aubergines until they go soft, scoop out the flesh, combine with herbs, seasoning, cheese, egg and breadcrumb. Then shape into balls, roll in bread crumbs and fry. I think this could also make an excellent side to simple preparations of meat or fish. The pasta course featured a sage and almond pesto; a useful reminder that you can play around with a lot more than basil here. Top tip: don’t add the oil until the very end, so you use only what the mixture needs get to the right consistency.
The main was stuffed calamari, something I’d done before but it was useful to get professional tips. Formal instruction showed me that I’d been over-stuffing my version. I also learned that salted capers, rinsed and dried, are much nicer than the usual ones in brine if you can find them, and that sanding your pan with bread crumbs before frying the calamari helps them not to stick. We wandered south from Sicily to the island of Pantelleria for the inspiration for the accompanying potato salad; a sharp, vinegary version with red onions and more of those gorgeous salted capers.

Desert was a “gelo” of melon. Gelo is simply fruit juice and sugar, heated and thickened with corn flour (corn starch if you're speaking American). It’s presumably what inspired the American brand Jell-o, as the texture is almost identical. Rather stupidly, it never occurred to me that my recipe for watermelon gelo could be used for any fruit, and made into an elegant sweet. Here, we poured the thickened mixture into coup-style glasses that had been dusted with powdered cinnamon and then dressed the tops with edible flowers before putting the glasses in the fridge to set. The order of cooking, of course, was not necessarily the same as of eating, depending on the times needed to prepare. Dessert, for example, was the first thing we tackled because of the setting time.
One of the joys of these experiences is sitting down your classmates to share the fruits of your efforts. I’ve never had more fun with the eating part of a cooking class, because I’ve never wrapped one up in such lavish interiors. We sat down at a table set for 12 under impressive Venetian glass chandeliers. Proper china, glassware and cutlery had been laid out and the duchess’ assistant had changed into an old-style black and white maid’s uniform to serve. French doors stood open on either side of the room, the exterior ones showing off the sea view while interior faced a courtyard draped with plants. The furniture was grand, 19th-century stuff at home in the architecture, with silver gleaming from the sideboard and big display cabinets showing off an impressive array of glassware marked with the family crest. Landscapes and family portraits looked down on us. I felt distinctly under-dressed.
After an unhurried lunch, the duchess rose from the table and invited us to tour the palace. (You take your things with you at this point, as the tour also leads you out.)

As you wander through the ballroom, the library, a sitting room and several more streamlined, museum-like rooms, the duchess explains the history of the building, its connection to the famous author and how her husband ended up as the heir. Tomasi di Lampedusa didn’t have children, but adopted the younger son of some equally aristocratic cousins to ensure he had someone to pass his legacy on to. The adopted Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi would go on to marry Nicoletta, your host for the day, and was a giant in the cultural world. He ran several orchestras and opera houses, led the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and wrote several books. Back in Palermo, he restored this palace … heavily damaged in WWII … and helped to promote his adopted father’s legacy.

Here, you can see the original manuscript of the book, first editions, notes and excerpts that weren’t used, and the library where he did most of his work. There’s a portrait of the author’s father, who was the model for the prince who is the main character in the book. If you’ve read The Leopard, everything in these rooms will remind you of some aspect of the story. If you haven’t read it, don’t even dream of setting foot in Sicily without doing so. It unlocks the soul of this island. It also turns Cooking with the Duchess into the most unique culinary workshop I’ve ever experienced.

I predict that a day cooking with the duchess in The Leopard’s lair will become a much hotter ticket next year after Netflix brings out its new adaptation of the novel. So if you’re interested in joining her, get in touch well in advance.
An additional note: The duchess also offers rental apartments within the sprawling palace for tourists. I loved our B&B for its proximity to the opera but I'd be very tempted to try this on my next visit to Palermo,

Sunday, 27 October 2024

Sicilian Food Part Two: Accursio elevates traditional cuisine to an innovative and delicious place

I curate my social media so rigorously that it’s easy to forget how toxic an environment an online community can be. Thus I was taken by surprise when, while asking about Michelin-starred dining experiences within a usually-constructive Italian travel forum, several respondents energetically insulted me for the stupidity of wasting money on fine dining. I like to think the aggressors weren’t aware of just how nasty they came across. But they did raise a fair point. When Sicilian food is so consistently excellent, and often inexpensive, why would you spend all that money on a fancy restaurant?

In three words: elevation, innovation, and education. 

Sicily’s magnificent local produce, the cultural melange of its history and its natives’ obsession with food create one of the best culinary cultures in the world. It is, however, fundamentally a cuisine known for its simplicity and heartiness. There are culinary traditionalists, raised in the sacred foundations of the Cordon Bleu, who acknowledge Italian as perfectly pleasant for a hearty, casual meal but instinctively believe it can’t compete with francophone dishes of high complexity, smooth sauces, and elegant presentation. Even MasterChef UK, a franchise that’s mostly abandoned classical French food in favour of more exotic cuisines, will always question whether pasta dishes are “good enough” and can be presented nicely enough, to win. (Happily, Campania-born Vito Coppola won Celebrity Masterchef this year with a style uncompromisingly drawn from Southern Italy, so there is hope.) Quite simply, in a world where the French classics still set the standard, I wanted to see how a Sicilian chef could elevate his game to compete.

Second, while everyone buys in to the idea of the cucina povera … the wholesome, poor but loving kitchen of the Italian grandmother that’s existed for time immemorial …. it’s largely a myth created by food marketing companies in the late 20th century. As John Dickie explains in his excellent book Delizia: The Epic History of Italians and their Food, Italian cuisine is heavily based on the urban traditions of aristocrats and rich merchants who were always looking for something new. (Most peasants across Italy were so poor until the 20th century that they existed on monotonous subsistence diets with little scope for culinary traditions.) The Italians have also been fantastic at taking advantage of new ingredients and processes, whether that’s spices coming in from the Far East, tomatoes and peppers being introduced from the New World or machines making pasta. I wanted to see how this long tradition of innovation came to life in modern Sicily.

Finally, I wanted to learn. One of the joys of the kinds of restaurants that get Michelin stars is that they’re obsessed about their supply chain, their processes and their wines, and they’re very happy to tell you about it. Each dish usually comes with a narrative, and these sorts of places hire staff who are delighted to engage in conversation about the nuances of what’s on the plate. If you go for a wine pairing, you’ll inevitably be introduced to new grape varieties and producers. Every meal is an education. Sure, I knew more than the average paesana about Sicilian food, but I wanted to learn more.

Enter Accursio Craparo, known as the Chef of the two Sicilies for his passion to bring the traditions of the east and the west of the island together. Accursio is not just a chef but a storyteller, something obvious from the moment you ring the bell to be allowed into this quiet, peaceful restaurant space in the vaulted basement of an old palace. As he explains on his website: “Everything here resembles myself, in the warmth of a house that I feel is mine and where I am happy to welcome my guests. The floor presents itself as a field of flowers, the walnut chairs and tables recall the generous trees, the colours are those of the countryside, the lanterns those of the small boats that used to hang from the trees on summer evenings.”

The narrative continues on the plate. The first dish, called “welcome to Sicily”, is a wooden bowl of wild herbs cradling a sphere of liquid that’s somewhere between a consommé and a herbal tea. Close your eyes, inhale, and you could be walking through a fragrant meadow. Next comes “the rite of origins”, a simple presentation of bread, salt and local olive oil. This is the third fine dining restaurant of the year in which we’ve seen bread spotlighted as its own course rather than consigned to the basket for pre-meal snacking. Given bread’s sacral role in human life, and Sicily’s profound Catholicism, it’s particularly logical here.

Preliminaries over, it’s time to swim in abundant seafood. “The arrival of the breeze” presents fried mullet, apricot and yogurt, so exquisitely shaped it looks more like a piece of cake than a savoury. “Painted blue” vied for our favourite dish of the night: two small, perfectly-grilled squid with goat's ricotta, seaweed and saffron. The mix of green, yellow and white sauces on the plate reminded me of the bright tilework that clothes the island. “The juice of Sicily” was not lemon but a sauce for linguini with anchovy, tuna bottarga and fennel. Anyone who thinks pasta can’t be elevated to fine dining needs to take a look at this dish.

We moved inland with another pasta dish called “scorched lands” celebrating the distinctive formaggio ragusano cheese that somehow comes from the cows here despite the fact the land is more often brown than green. It came on a handmade pasta shape I’d never seen before, sort of a large spiral, thick and chewy, sauce made more exotic with spices and capers. Next came “the metamorphosis of the landscape”. We were so delighted with everything and were chatting about so many things with the staff that I forgot to ask what that name had to do with roast fish that had been poached in “acqua pazza di mandorle”, a traditional broth and wine-based liquid here spiked with almonds.

Our transition from savoury to sweet came with the kind of illusion often deployed to add a bit of fun to the high art of fine dining. The local potters had been put to work not on traditional forms but on egg cartons and spheres that looked like they’d come out of a chicken that morning. Your “egg” opens to reveal egg white and yolk, but dip your spoon and you’ll find something close to a panna cotta with a centre of sharp passion fruit puree. And finally we’d arrived at the climax, essentially a chocolate mille-feuille accompanied by sheep’s ricotta ice cream. The crunch of the layers came not from your traditional pastry but from aubergine, somehow magicked from vegetable to sweet treat. Given how much aubergine this island seems to produce at this time of year, finding new uses for it makes perfect sense. I’d completely lost track of the names of the dishes by this point so forgot to ask what story “a bite of culture” told. Other than … if this is culture, I’ll take another bite for myself.
I was the designated driver for the night, so my husband did the six-glass wine pairing and I took sips. As you might imagine from the menu, the wines were mostly whites though varied widely depending on the flavour profile of the sauces. There was a light red to go with the earthy pasta and one of the fish, continuing the mission of many sommeliers to prove you can drink a lot more with seafood than white wine. The wines were mostly Sicilian and all unknown to us, so certainly delivered on the education front.

That menu at Accursio will set you back €135, with an additional €85 for a six-glass wine pairing. I’m never going to claim that’s cheap, but even with the terrible exchange rate at the moment for British Sterling, it was still at least 15% less than you would pay for an equivalent experience in London. And, if I’m being brutally honest, wasn’t that much more expensive than some of our meals at nicer “every day” restaurants in Sicily when we had three courses, an aperitif and a bottle of good wine. So while it should certainly be saved for a special treat, Accursio made that splurge worth while with all the elevation, innovation and education I was looking for. In addition to nine plates of extraordinary food.

Saturday, 26 October 2024

Sicilian Food Part One: Consistently delicious dining in a land of diversity, tradition and seasonal obsession

Italian food is regularly rated the world’s favourite national cuisine. Recent reports have revealed that there are more than 470,000 Italian restaurants around the world, more than any other nation’s culinary style. Globally, the Italian food industry is worth more than €228 billion. The irony, of course, is that if you really understand Italian food, you know there’s no such thing.

Italy as a modern country only dates back to 1861 and what we call “Italian” food is profoundly regional. Sure, everyone eats pasta … except the people who prefer risotto … but the shape of the pasta, whether it’s wet or dry, stuffed or sauced, with egg or without, varies widely. Before you even start down the path of what to put on it. There may be a pizzeria on every corner, but the thin, crispy pinsa you’ll get in the Dolomites and the thick, tomato-drenched sfincione of Sicily are completely different beasts from the Neapolitan classic. I remember celebrating a Ferrara family Easter at which a cousin excitedly shared that she was trying a “foreign” recipe. It was from Calabria.

Of all of the regional styles that conspire to make up Italian food as the world knows it today, Sicilian is my favourite. It’s no surprise that I default to cuisine of my childhood. (Although Sicilian-American food, as I explained in this article from my last trip to Sicily, is a different beast from what’s served on the beautiful island.) I’m not just voting for comfort and nostalgia. Sicilian is at the top of my list because it has a greater variety and is lighter than most other regions’ fare, and has by far the best deserts. Those superlatives are due to its tumultuous history and its extraordinary natural larder.

The Sicilians have been colonised by others for more than 4,000 years and all of those influences flow through their food. The Greeks, the Spanish, the French, the Arabs and more. Unusual spices, different ingredients, unique methods. The Arabs brought both sugar and pastry, laying the foundation for Sicily’s extraordinary pasticcerie today.

Fruit and vegetables benefit from almost consistent sun and, in much of the island, volcanic soil. Tomatoes, aubergines, figs, almonds, melons and more are all bursting with flavour. If you’re there in September, the first two will be on every menu in multiple incarnations.

Seafood is abundant and they eat many kinds in a variety of ways. But Sicilians know and respect what’s seasonal. Few restaurants would serve tuna in the autumn; everyone knows it’s a spring fish and any hitting a plate in September would have been frozen and flown in. There is meat, too. Beef, lamb and goat all inhabit the centre of the country. But even Sicily is regional and if you’re within 15 miles of the coast you’re not likely to find as much of it on your plate as things that swim.

Visitors imagine they’ll be constantly stuffed with carbohydrates but the reality isn’t so extreme. While a formal meal is four or five courses … antipasti, pasta, a main course, vegetables and salads, desserts … in reality Sicilians will graze across two or three courses and may split dishes with a companion. Serving sizes are appropriate, not excessive, and many pastas dishes feature as many vegetables as noodles. It’s rare to find a cream sauce, and cheese is used sparingly, almost as seasoning, rather than being at the centre of a dish. It is, in fact, probably one of the healthiest and most vegetarian-friendly places you can visit in Italy.

In Palermo, there were no set dining hours. Restaurants were lively and serving from noon until midnight. Out in the less-visited countryside things are more restricted, with lunch wrapping by 2:30 and dinner running from around 7:30 to 10:30. Other than Modica on a Saturday night, we didn’t go anywhere that followed Spain’s late hours. Many restaurants outside of Palermo were only open a few nights a week, and closed between lunch and dinner. While the food was universally delicious, limited hours and lots of empty tables suggest that the Sicilian restaurant scene is not as financially robust as owners would like it to be.

For more general observations on Sicilian food, see the article I wrote after my first visit. It all remains true except for my statement that cannoli at home were just as good as those in Sicily. I was in more touristy places that trip and had not discovered the fresh, sheep’s milk ricotta versions produced in the Val di Noto. They exist on another, higher culinary sphere.

I offer a roundup below of some of my favourite spots but, to be honest, I didn’t have a bad meal in two weeks. Even in Palermo, where we ate in obviously tourist-focused establishments where hawkers on the pavement pitched for our business. If anything, we turned that situation to our advantage, asking them what was fresh and best today. If they couldn’t give us details, and if there wasn’t a seasonal menu of the day to complement the printed menu, we steered clear. (We had several meals in the streets between our B&B and the opera house, a district heaving with restaurants. All good but interchangeable; none made the list below.)
AquaMadre at the Almar Giardino di Costanza, Mazaro del Vallo

The fine dining restaurant within our hotel for the first four nights was the only gig in town, unless you wanted to drive 20 minutes into Mazara, so we ate there twice. (We had heavy snacks in the bar and did a light picnic in the room on the other evenings.) I’m not sure I’d go out of my way to dine here … I suspect there were restaurants in town that were almost as good and a lot cheaper … but if you’re going to be “stuck” somewhere this was no sacrifice. Standout dishes included a a bundle of red prawn carpaccio stuffed with local goats’ cheese (cheese and raw fish shouldn’t work, but it was fabulous); a lightly seared tuna with a pistachio crust (this was before I got the local tuna lecture, probably flown in from Asia but still delicious); caserecce with milk sausage ragout and local artichokes; and amberjack with pesto Trapanese (crushed almonds, tomato and basil). This was my first introduction to the noble Tropea onion, so sweet it might be classified as a fruit. It appeared here as an amuse bouche: gently cooked leaves around a choux pastry morsel stuffed with sharp goats cheese and topped with a variety of seeds. There was also an eye-wateringly delicious dessert that had taken the flavour profile of crema di pistachio and turned it into a ball of delight.
A Cumacca, Caltagirone
With outdoor tables charmingly perched on the broad treads of one of this town’s many enormous staircases, A Cumacca benefited from exceptional views. Up and to the left one of the town’s main squares, down to the right the stairs falling away into a valley before the lower half of town reared up to fill the horizon on its other hill. It was a tiny place that hardly seemed to have more than a galley kitchen and appeared to be more of a bar than a restaurant, but appearances deceive. This was a delicious and substantial meal, so filling that desserts were impossible. Given that this was as far away from the coast as we got, it’s no surprise that we encountered more meat here. My husband started with beef carpaccio and moved on to pork tenderloin prepared with the season’s fresh nectarines. (Another habit the Sicilians picked up from the Arabs is mixing sweet and savoury.) I tried a black arancino made with cuttlefish ink (interesting, but it didn’t beat more traditional styles) and went on to some red snapper. Even here the coast is only 25 miles away, so the fish is fresh.
Cucina Sincera, Ragusa Ibla
In addition to being my favourite town in the Val di Noto, Ragusa Ibla delivered my best moderately-priced meal of the whole trip. The tiny restaurant sits in the shadow of the bombastic facade of the church of San Giuseppe, with more tables outside than in. The sinuous lines and bold statues of the church and the other magnificent architecture around you will give you plenty to look at while you eat. The restaurant drew me in with a bold chalkboard that said “We are against war and tourist menus” and they were as good as their word. Daily specials augmented the printed menu, something I always look for in any restaurant here. All of the dishes were simple and traditional, but cooked to perfection. You’ll get caponata in pretty much every restaurant on the island and everyone’s take will be slightly different. Here, the individual vegetables held their own shape and taste, the dominant notes were tomato and aubergine and the balance of sweet and sour was perfect. Comforting cavati (a small, shell-shaped pasta) Norma with aubergine, tomato and ricotta (what my mother used to call pink sauce) followed. An elegantly simple, obviously fresh cannolo crowned the meal. All consumed while sketching the church across the way, with a friendly waiter on hand when I needed him. Perfetto. 
Ristorane Baqqalà, Scicli
Another Val di Noto restaurant with a view, this fish-heavy spot has a triangular outdoor deck dining area looking over the outrageously over-the-top Palazzo Beneventano. You are literally just a stone’s throw from the town’s biggest public space, the Piazza Italia, but few tourists seem to wander here. It’s a blissfully quiet spot to explore traditional Sicilian food with some innovative twists while surrounded by the architecture that makes this area so famous. I didn’t bother with a starter but got served a basket of soft rolls fresh out of the oven with local olive oil. (Much of the bread in central Italy is made without salt, exceptionally plain and doesn’t have much taste on its own. That is not the case in Sicily.) The daily pasta special was freshly-caught amberjack quickly cooked with just-picked tomatoes and aubergines and a hint of spice. To follow, the only place in Sicily that dared to play with the sacred cannoli. Here, a cannolo verticale. Instead of the usual tube, they’d cooked the shell as round disks and layered it with the cannoli creme. Basically a Sicilian take on a mille feuille. It tastes pretty much the same as the standard cannolo but is a fun variation and, given how fiddly cannoli shells are to make, might be one to try at home. 
I Cucci, Palermo
Sicily is one of the few places I’ll break my tourist rule of never eating in a high-traffic area overlooking major tourist spots. In Paris, Venice or Barcelona you’re likely to get overpriced food that’s deeply average, since the owners don’t have to worry about repeat trade. Here, you get places like I Cucci, owned by two brothers who moved away to make their living as so many Sicilians do, then decided to move home and open this place. While Italian food is notoriously regional, it is possible to get great interpretations of one place’s dish somewhere else. Ten years before we had the best bistecca fiorentina of our lives just outside of Palermo, up in Monreale. It was on the menu here. Could we be lucky again? Yes. Once again, a better quality steak, better grilled, than I’ve had on many attempts in and around the dish’s home in Florence. That was preceded by some exceptionally cooked octopus for me … crispy and smoky on the outside, tender and full of flavour inside … on a bed of hummus with roasted tomatoes. Here’s that eastern Mediterranean influencer again. My husband started with inspiration from another direction; a roast beetroot and almond salad on a goat’s cheese cream that would have been at home in a French cafe. Dessert was another in a procession of fabulous cannoli. When you know you won’t get anything like it at home, it’s hard to order anything else. The restaurant is on the Palazzo Bologni, just off the Via Vittorio Emanuele about 100 metres up from the Quattro Canti.
Salina, Palermo
Head towards the opera house from the Quattro Canti, rather than towards I Cucci and the cathedral, and you’ll come to an upscale fish restaurant on the corner of Via Maqueda and Via Bari called Salina. It’s one of the few restaurants we ate in that had a generous dining space inside as well as out, suggesting a year-round crowd. It was also unusually high-end on the decor, with elegant black and silver interiors and modern murals. Prices and dishes were a little closer to fine dining than some of the other spots on this list, but it still had a casual atmosphere and a variety of price points. We, unsurprisingly, drifted upwards on that scale, especially when presented with an interesting wine list with lots of local options and helpful descriptions. More variations on the same seasonal themes here: tartare of the island’s famous red shrimp, sesame-seed crusted amberjack on a bed of aubergine with a topping of sweet Tropea onion, both from the specials board. We seriously considered going back another night, but Palermo is so swollen with tempting restaurants it seemed wrong to eat at the same place twice.

Next time, I move on to our Michelin-starred experience in Modica, one so extraordinary it demands its own article.

Friday, 25 October 2024

Val di Noto Part 2: My Tier 2 choices demonstrate the diversity of this fascinating region

If the whole glorious UNESCO World Heritage site takes its name from the town of Noto, and Noto is the No. 1 place in the region that most day trippers head to when they leave Sicily’s eastern shore, what’s it doing at No. 3 on my list? In a word: overtourism. 

I’m all about finding the authentic, tapping in to quiet moments of wonder and discovering something
new. Those are hard things to do when you hear more American accents than local, and the whole place is so curated for day trippers you feel more like you’re at the Italian pavilion in Disney’s Epcot than in an historic Sicilian town.

That’s not to say you should skip Noto. It’s gorgeous. Just not as wonderful as the towns I told you about in the first part of this report. Let’s move on to my “best of the rest” across this fascinating region cum World Heritage Site.

AN OVER-CROWDED THIRD: NOTO
Noto is a monumental piece of planned cityscaping, on par with the Champs d’Elysee in Paris or The Mall in Washington D.C. When the town planners went to work here, they decided to organise the city by social class and function. Magnificent went high, practical and utilitarian got a space down the hill. A wide strip down the middle hosted the civic buildings and spaces where everyone met. The whole place is built into a hillside facing due west, turning its honey-coloured stone face even more golden in the afternoon light and treating everyone to blockbuster sunsets. That’s the Instagram moment for modern sightseers, and one I skipped after seeing the crowds on a morning visit. (I also had the advantage of a private, rooftop hot tub with its own sunset view back at our apartment, Melifra.)

The Corso Vittorio Emanuele is the spine that separates high and low. It hosts churches, government buildings, theatres and some of the biggest palaces. There are more grand homes and monasteries above, with lots of showy staircases the locals have painted to promote upcoming events or simply as vertical murals. The commercial part of town is below; both elegant 18th century buildings and a sprawl of modern ones. Driving into Noto was the worst traffic I encountered in Sicily outside of Palermo; it took me more than half an hour to get from the main road through this bit to the main tourist car parks up by the municipal playing field.

The effort is worth it, especially if you arrive on the Corso at the right place. If you’ve parked near the sports field, find the Via Vincenzo Gioberti. Come down it and you emerge out of a small, dark lane onto an elevated piazza with the whole town spread beneath you. This is “the money shot” of the Val di Noto, with stairs and formal gardens ahead of you, the cathedral atop its massive flight of stairs below and to your right, the elegant town hall across from it and magnificent buildings stretching away. It’s no wonder a Sotheby’s Real Estate sign is the first bit of branding you see here. What appealed to rich people at the turn of the 18th century still appeals today.

Descend onto the Corso and you’ll find a variety of churches, small museums and shops to poke around in. It’s the same mix as the other towns in the Val: pottery, luxury foodstuffs, clothing, jewellery. But it feels like there’s a higher percentage of those tourist tat shops where you can be fairly sure the cheap magnets, colourful dish towels and miniature versions of Sicilian pots were made in China.

One spot stands above the rest and deserves your attention. Yes, Cafe Sicilia is exactly as delicious as you thought it would be when you watched the wonderful Chef’s Table documentary about it on Netflix. Yes, theirs are the best cannoli I’ve ever had in my life. (And trust me, this child of the Ferraras of Novara di Sicilia has consumed a lot of cannoli in her life.) 

I suspect it was because they use sheep’s milk ricotta rather than cow’s to create a cannoli cream that’s silky smooth yet not too sweet and has just a touch of sharpness to it. There’s no additional flavouring. No added chocolate chips. No ends dusted in crusted pistachios or anything else. Just cannoli cream in a light, perfectly crispy shell. The simplest of incarnations, and the most perfect. I tried that in house, in a dining area that feels like it hasn’t changed since the ‘60s despite the place’s recent fame, and got a box to take away with a variety of other goodies we sampled across the next few days. Their single-serving Cassata Siciliana was so amazing I may never attempt to make one again, so inferior are my efforts. If the traffic wasn’t so bad, and the crowds so thick, I would have probably returned to Noto several times just to continue working my way through Cafe Sicilia’s menu. 

Leave the architecture. Take the cannoli.

A FOURTH FOR THE CRAFTY: CALTAGIRONE
A profound danger of the combination of social media and digital photography is that certain things can be made to look dramatically grander than they actually are.

The 430-foot long staircase of Santa Maria del Monte is the most frequently shared photo of this town. It’s famous for the front of each step being tiled with a different pattern, representing the output of this legendary centre of ceramic production. Once a year, it’s decked out with an amazing floral festival. I knew I wouldn’t see that. But many other pictures show plants and pottery spilling out onto the length of the staircase, plants cascading from the balconies above and everything drenched in bright colour. The truth? The buildings on either side are a bit grungy, few shops extend their wares onto the steps and the patterns on the tiles are so small, and so subtle in their colouring, that the whole thing just appears grey from any distance. The Spanish Steps, it’s not.

Caltagirone sprawls a long way. It’s definitely worth hopping a ride on the little motorised train that tells you about the town while driving you around the highlights. You’re at the northwest tip of the region here and you’ve lost the golden stone of Ragusa, Scicli and Noto. The buildings are grey. Fewer have been restored and cleaned. There’s far less flamboyant Baroque architecture here.

So why bother? This is the centre of ceramics production in Sicily. You’ll find plenty of shops in every town in the Val di Noto selling interpretations of the classics, particularly pots shaped like the heads of kings and queens and the three-legged “trinacria” with Medusa’s head at the centre. Here, however, you’ll find them in bewildering abundance. 

If you like to see craftspeople at work, it’s great fun to wander down back lanes and look into studios where people are shaping or painting the clay. If you were a collector, this is the place you come for the new and different. It’s obvious that modern artists have their studios here beside the traditional producers and are creating stuff closer to Grayson Perry than the decor in every restaurant. I found it fascinating to wander shop-to-shop to see the differences, and to see how certain producers reacted to interiors trends or found a specific niche. One place leaned into African motifs and animal prints, another into a dark, spooky Goth vibe. Same basic shapes, radically different interpretations.

Pottery fans will find this all great fun. But Caltagirone is a bit of a one-trick pony. If you aren’t into the nuances of ceramics, you’re likely to poke your head into a few shops and then … as my husband did … retreat to a bench on a piazza with your Kindle while the pottery fans keep wandering. Even if you do love the art form, you may find the sheer abundance too overwhelming to make any choices. I did buy a piece of pottery, but not until later in Scicli, where I actually found having less choice helped me to hone in on a style I liked. There is no monetary advantage to coming to Caltagirone; I found prices fairly consistent across the whole region. So I’d advise that this is a town for the specialist rather than the casual tourist.

If you do find yourself here, however, make time for an al fresco lunch at A Cumacca. Its outdoor tables are beautifully located on a staircase … less famous than the one mentioned above but with the advantage of being in the middle of the upper town. Part of town, including the tiled staircase, stretches above you while more stairs plunge downward. The “lower town” rises from below and fills the other horizon. You can enjoy a lazy meal contemplating the workout anyone who lives here must get while walking around. No wonder they can pack away the pasta.

The best place to park for sightseeing is along the Viale Regina Elena at the top of town. Walk across the road to where the hilltop falls away beneath you to be treated to a spectacular view of the hills and plains of central Sicily, with Etna looming in the distance. When you consider that the volcano is more than 40 miles away from this point, you start to grasp just how big it is.

AN UNFAIR FIFTH? MODICA
Fair disclosure: We spent less than an hour nosing around Modica in advance of dinner at Accursio, a Michelin-starred restaurant there. (Report to come.) The meal was one of the highlights of the trip. The town, we could take or leave.
It has the requisite grand architecture: showy churches sitting atop mountainous staircases, extravagant palaces with ornate balcony braces and door and window surrounds. But it also has a major road making a dogleg right through the centre of town, and with that a feeling of almost big-city scale and modern usage. Modica felt a bit closer to Palermo or Catania than to its Val di Noto sisters.

Its biggest claim to fame is a distinctive kind of chocolate, which is sold in many specialist shops throughout town. Modica’s cioccolato is a PR and messaging triumph. You will read, hear and watch the same story repeated: this is special because it’s closer to the chocolate first brought over by Spaniards. It’s truly artisan. It’s unique. Connoisseurs appreciate its grainy nature. 

Let’s be honest, people. Sometimes “original” is not better. 

Chefs have been improving and perfecting chocolate for centuries. I prefer their innovations. We tried Modica’s speciality at multiple shops, from multiple makers, in multiple flavours. Uniformly, it tasted like chocolate that had gone wrong in the tempering process. The overwhelming top note is raw sugar, not cacao in any form. The fact that the chocolate presented by the local Michelin-starred chef was not grainy Modica stuff but the smooth, tempered, cocoa-forward version most of us know and love says it all.

Modica may possibly win the prize for best Val di Noto nightlife, though we didn’t go out enough to do a fair compare-and-contrast. We left the restaurant around 10:30 to find the streets heaving with people. Not tourists, but Italians, disproportionately under 40. There were so many people the main street had been shut down and pedestrianised to facilitate socialising. (This necessitated a long, dark, twisting, sometimes white-knuckle reroute home that would not have been for the faint-hearted driver.) The crowds were not out for a festival or anything special, this was just the Saturday night passeggiata in Modica. Grab a drink, take a stroll, celebrate life with your friends. Impressive.

BEYOND ARCHITECTURE…
The reason for the Val di Noto World Heritage listing is Baroque buildings. But if you’ve had enough, there’s also a lovely coastline dotted with small fishing villages, beaches (mostly empty during our September visit) and the wonderful Vendicari Nature Reserve. There are more than 3,700 acres of protected landscape along the coast in this reserve. Well-maintained hiking trails take you through lagoons, grasslands, salt marshes, beaches and some picturesque ruins. The latter includes an impressive old tuna production facility, or tonnara, making a statement as romantic as any castle on the coast.

Information boards throughout tell you about the flora and fauna, explaining that more than 180 species of birds visit the reserve on their annual migratory paths. This makes spring and autumn the best times to wander here. In late September we were lucky enough to see the beginning of the flamingo migration. Numbers would have increased in the coming month but there were still about 50 on the lagoon we hiked to. These were nowhere near the vivid pink of the genus lawnus plasticus, but rather a rose-tinted cream. They are marvellously odd-looking creatures whose long-legged marsh wading and angular bending for feeding is incredibly entertaining. We completely lost track of time perched in the bird-watching hides taking in their antics.

There are a variety of different beaches along the shore here, some smooth and powdery, others rockier and with more waves. The reserve web site has clear descriptions. In a country where “beach” usually means serried ranks of chairs and umbrellas hired from beach clubs who control patches of sand, this is where you’ll find the wilder, more natural coasts common in other parts of the world.

Not far off this shore, but outside the reserve, is the Villa Romana del Tellaro, which is your best chance to see spectacular ancient mosaics in the region if you don’t have time to get all the way to the Villa Romana del Casale.

We drove the coast road from Vendicari down to Portopalo di Capo, Sicily’s southeastern tip. It’s 12 miles of vineyards, commercial tomato farms, still-working fishing communities, quiet coastal roads and small pockets of beach. 
I saw a lot of signs for agrotourismi … the Italian take on farm-based B&Bs … and I suspect there’s an entirely different sort of tourist that fills this coast in high summer. You could do a moderately priced beach holiday here with plenty of activity, local colour in the port villages of Marzamemi and Portopalo, without ever bothering with the architecture-rich World Heritage Site.

Whatever your preferred holiday, my experience made it clear that the Val di Noto is worth more than a day trip. This is a place to sink in, go local and enjoy.

Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Val di Noto Part 1: Ragusa and Scicli top my list in a region that wasn't quite as expected

Most visitors to Sicily do the Val di Noto as a day trip from Catania or Taormina, heading for the eponymous Noto and perhaps one other town. That was never going to work for me.

This UNESCO World Heritage Site is comprised of eight different towns, all famous because they were built in a flamboyant Sicilian Baroque style after this whole part of the country was levelled by an earthquake in 1693. Given how much I love Baroque architecture, and how much I love Italy, this was an area I needed to sink into. It was worth the effort. These are spectacularly beautiful towns, bearing more resemblance to enormous opera sets than normal living spaces. In a country where so much of life is conducted outdoors, this makes perfect sense. You can almost see the men in their flamboyant frock coats and wigs escorting ladies in their enormous skirts, promenading down the gracious avenues and piazzas, their colourful clothes thrown into stark relief against the uniform gold of the local stone.

Deciding which of these towns to prioritise was tricky, particularly since my pre-trip research didn’t throw up a lot of distinction between them. Everyone has their favourites, but few correspondents lay out specifics as to why. I’ll try to buck that trend by giving you my take, from most to least favourite and the reasons for my preferences.

But first, the region itself. All of the travel literature had me envisioning something like the hill towns of Tuscany. Get that image out of your head right away. While each town has a gorgeous Baroque core, most are surrounded by fairly ugly modern developments. They’re also all a lot bigger than I imagined. It’s hard to get the “time traveller” shot here like the ones so easy to take of Tuscany’s San Gimignano or the Cotswolds’ Bibury, where everything in your view is picturesque and of its period. You might get a pretty glimpse of a few domes and towers, but they’ll be rising from a sea of grunge.

The area is also a bustling commercial region with intensive agriculture … there was a veritable sea of polytunnels in the five miles between our flat and the coastline … and lots of light industry. That means that normal Italians live and work here, giving you a more authentic experience than you might get elsewhere, even if large tracts are less than picturesque.

It’s also worth noting that the Val di Noto is not a valley, despite the name. The Italian for valley is “valle”. Val is a uniquely Sicilian evolution of an Arabic word for an administrative region, “wilayah”. And this region is big. It took us more than two hours to drive from its northeast corner to our base in Ispica, near the middle of its southern border. (We consistently found both Google and Apple Maps wildly optimistic; travel time regularly took two to three times longer than their estimates and I was not dawdling.) There are some excellent highways but once you’re off them, you either seem to be motoring through industrial areas or taking winding roads through dramatic but often desolate landscapes of craggy limestone peaks.

An ambitious tourist might do two of the eight towns in the UNESCO listing in a day, but with navigating local roads, finding parking and walking into town centres before sightseeing even begins, one a day is a much more realistic pace. Especially if you treat yourself to a lingering lunch somewhere with a good view, something I’d consider an essential part of the Val di Noto experience. Plus, even for an architectural obsessive, the towns do look remarkably similar once you’re within them. There comes a point when the ornate balcony supports, sumptuous scrollwork and writhing foliage in stone, concave and convex facades, cavorting angels and grimacing “grotesques” all start to look the same. For me, it was Day Five. For others, it’s likely to be less.

I’ll start in this article with my two favourite towns, and come back in Part Two with the best of the rest and some other delights in the area.

MY FAVOURITE: RAGUSA IBLA
After the earthquake, most towns in the Val abandoned their original sites and rebuilt on virgin land. Ragusa bucked the trend, stubbornly rebuilding on its ancient foundations while building a new town above it at the same time. Today, that means there’s an upper and lower town, with the lower … Ibla … being the one on the older foundations. But don’t let “lower” fool you. The only thing on the valley floor here is the car park. Ibla is on the lower of two hills, and it covers the crown of it. The newer town, with its modern expansion, crawls up the higher hill behind. Because Ibla had built out its hilltop before the end of the 18th century, this is the most picturesque, historically uniform skyline you’ll get in the Val di Noto.

Because they rebuilt on old foundations, the smaller lanes twist and wind more than in the other towns, adding more charm. You climb steadily uphill from the car park, passing increasingly ornate palaces of long-dead aristocrats, before you crest the hill and find yourself at the back of the cathedral. From there it’s a gentle but increasingly attractive slope down, as the best architecture in town faces onto this long rectangle of a piazza in front of the church. Like many in the Val the holy building sits atop a prodigious staircase; climbing to heaven isn’t just a metaphor in this part of the world. (Top photo.)

The streets from here to the end of town, equivalent to perhaps eight square blocks in American measurement, are packed with grand old buildings, smaller piazzas, more grand churches and a wealth of restaurants. You’ll find the same sorts of tourist shops throughout the Val di Noto: ceramics, textiles, jewellery, linen clothing, luxury food items, hand-made cosmetics and soaps high in olive oil and lemon content. But they seemed more distinctive and of higher quality here. For example, Colori del Sole, an artists’ collective selling clothing and home wares in shops across the island, has their biggest store here. I was delighted with a small shop in which a graphic artist sold his Sicilian-inspired designs for phone covers. The most distinctive shop in town, though you’re unlikely to buy anything there, is Cinabro Carrettieri, a traditional Sicilian cart maker. It’s great fun to wander in and watch them at work. If their painted scenes look familiar, there’s a reason for it. Dolce and Gabbana outsource the design of their Sicilian-themed housewares to the artists here.

The end of town is marked by some formal, 19th-century municipal gardens built in the grounds of an old monastery with fabulous views. Several disused church buildings have become garden follies within it. It’s a wonderful place to rest in the middle of your wandering.

Of course, rest comes at restaurants and cafes as well, and there are two that deserve attention here. Gelati di Vini, on the main piazza in front of the cathedral, is a combination wine and gelato shop that makes wine flavoured ice cream. They produce only a few wine flavours a day amongst more traditional flavours, and when they’re gone, they’re gone, so don’t delay. They were already sold out of one option when I stopped in at 11am but Moscato (usually a desert wine) and Brachetto (a light red) were delicious enough to make me wonder why this is the first time I’ve come across wine-flavoured ice cream. If alcoholic tastes are not your thing, they also do innovative flavours like fennel and violet.

When it’s time for lunch, stroll down to the next piazza down from the main one and grab a table at Cucina Sincera, in the shadow of the bombastic facade of the church of San Giuseppe. Its sinuous lines and bold statues will give you plenty to look at while you eat. The restaurant drew me in with a bold chalkboard that said “We are against war and tourist menus” and they were as good as their word. This was one of the best meals I had the whole trip, even though … as the name implies … it was all simple, traditional dishes. Caponata where the individual vegetables held their own shape and taste, and the balance of sweet and sour was perfect. Comforting cavati Norma with aubergine, tomato and ricotta (what my mother used to call pink sauce). An elegantly simple, obviously fresh cannolo. All consumed while sketching the church across the way, with a friendly waiter on hand when I needed him. Perfetto.
There were plenty of tourists here, and Ragusa Ibla is clearly attuned to them, but it never felt overly crowded. There were few groups; it was overwhelmingly independent travellers. And the groups I did spot were all Italian, here to check out the key locations used in the Montalbano detective series.

You can take a Montalbano tour in English, as well, but I haven’t seen the series so that would do me no good. You can sign up for tours to get inside old palaces and the grand 18th century assembly rooms. You can go back to Cinabro on a tour where they’ll explain the whole cart making process to you. I never got into the cathedral, or climbed up to the newer town. Attractive B&Bs and luxury hotels dot those winding streets behind the cathedral. If I were to return to the Val di Noto for just a couple of nights, rather than settling in to a long stay at the apartment we rented, I’d come here. I loved everything about the place.

THE RUNNER UP: SCICLI
The approach to Scicli (pronounced shee-klee) is as dramatic as its Baroque architecture. Unlike most of the other towns, it’s nestled in a steep-sided valley. My drive in on the Via Guardagna featured winding roads clinging to the side of pockmarked limestone cliffs, going down and down until you come through a defile and you’re suddenly on a street of golden stone houses tucked into the gap. The valley holding the town widens beyond that. The other road in, the Via San Nicolo, features a greener landscape but is just as steep, taking you up multiple hairpins before you get back to main roads.

In any country with a decent amount of rain, you’d never build here; the flood risk would be enormous. But in sun-baked Sicily, one drainage channel through town (bone dry in September) was enough. This sheltered valley proved a pleasant place for more fans of flamboyant Sicilian architecture to plant their roots. Though Scicli’s historic town centre was the smallest of all the towns I visited, it possibly had the best stone carvers. In a land of exceptional balcony brackets, the mermaids, horses and monsters here seemed particularly lifelike. Churches bristle with columns, ornate capitals, gesticulating saints and ornate ironwork. 

The Palazzo Beneventano is perhaps the grandest of all the palace exteriors I saw in this land of opulent palaces. The usual ornate balconies were topped with ornate door surrounds, windows were all unusual shapes, the corners of the building were dressed in rusticated stone covered with odd shapes and statues, and each doorway on the ground floor was topped with a giant, monstrous head. It’s an insane assault on the eyes, but lavishly gorgeous, and the essence of the Sicilian Baroque in the Val di Noto.

You can spend time studying this explosion if you stop for a meal at Ristorante Baqqalà, a fish restaurant with a triangular outdoor deck dining area where two lanes come together next to the palace. You are literally just a stone’s throw from the town’s biggest public space, the Piazza Italia, but few tourists seem to wander here. It’s a blissfully quiet place to explore traditional Sicilian food with some innovative twists while surrounded by the architecture that makes this area so famous. I didn’t bother with a starter but got served a basket of soft rolls fresh out of the oven with local olive oil. The daily pasta special was freshly-caught white fish quickly cooked with just-picked tomatoes and aubergines and a hint of spice. To follow, the only place in Sicily that dared to play with the sacred cannoli. Here, a cannolo verticale. Instead of the usual tube, they’d cooked the shell as round disks and layered it with the cannoli creme. Basically a Sicilian take on a mille feuille. It tastes pretty much the same as the standard cannolo but is a fun variation and, given how fiddly cannoli shells are to make, might be one to try at home.

Sightseeing in Scicli, whether you do it before or after eating, is just a few streets. The most picturesque is the Via Francesco Mormino Penna, with a good variety of shops, churches and cultural attractions. There’s a Museum of Costume, a historic apothecary’s shop and a couple of palaces, including an intriguing one with a Baroque outside and Liberty Style Interiors. Unfortunately, nothing was open to walk-up trade. I got the impression that … at least in September … there aren’t enough tourists in Scicli to staff such things for continuous opening, so they’re only available in conjunction with tours you book through the tourist information office. I was happy enough to just wander on my own appreciating exteriors, but that’s proof that there’s plenty to do in Scicli if you want to spend quality time here.

After days of nosing around ceramics shops, this is also where I finally made a purchase. Though everything in the shop had been made in Caltagirone, another town within the World Heritage Site designation that I’d already visited, I think the smaller, more curated selection in Scicli made it easier for me to narrow down a choice.

It is worth walking a few minutes away from this main tourist strip to check out the Church of San Bartolomeo. It sits on the Via Guardagna, just where that mountainous defile I came down to get here opens up into the town. There’s also a fair amount of street parking in front of it. Just don’t miss the signs pointing out that you have to pay for it. I did, and am still waiting to see if I get a ticket. If I did, I will pay it hoping it goes to support more amazing renovation works in town like those done at San Bartolomeo. The interior is a pastel candy fantasy of whites, blues, greens and golds. Built a bit later than many of the Baroque churches here, it’s just tipping into neo-classicism, so all the swirls, foliage, clouds and flying putti of the old style are matched with an explosion of capitals, architraves, cornices and pendentives. It’s like the architects decided they had to use every single trick in their repertoire. It is just as mad as the Palazzo Beneventano, but more colourful. Don’t miss the enormous presepe, or nativity scene, showing that it’s not just Neapolitans who know how to big up a humble Christmas tradition into a year-round show.

Ragusa and Scicli, my two favourite towns in the Val di Noto, are only 19 miles apart as the crow flies … though over an hour’s driving time on those windy roads. Thus it’s certainly possible to do them both in one day. But I think it would be the visual and intellectual equivalent of having too much sugar at once and making yourself sick. These Baroque towns are rich dishes to be consumed slowly, with time to digest between them.

Next time, I’ll cover the rest of my Val di Noto highlights.