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.