Ragusa

This is all that remains of the old mother church of San Giorgio that stood before 1693. The pointed portal is Catalan Gothic, carved most likely in the 15th century when this corner of Sicily was ruled from Aragonese Spain, with St George on horseback in the lunette between spread eagles. The old church was wrecked by the earthquake and demolished in 1718; only this doorway was preserved, set up on its own. In a town that lost its entire pre-Baroque fabric, it is the one surviving face of medieval Ragusa — a Gothic saint eternally killing his dragon, now opening onto nothing.

Opened in 1961 beneath the Ponte Nuovo, the museum tells the archaeology of the province from prehistory to Roman times: the indigenous Sikel settlements of the Iblean plateau (including the ancient Hybla Heraea on the Ibla rock), and above all the coastal Greek colony of Kamarina, founded by Syracuse in 598 BC. Displays include grave goods, ceramics, terracottas and a reconstructed archaic kiln.

Rebuilt after the 1693 earthquake by the self-taught architect Rosario Gagliardi (c.1690–1762), who began life as a carpenter and rose to become the presiding genius of the Val di Noto reconstruction. Entrusted to him in 1738, the foundation stone was laid in 1739 and the great convex façade — his acknowledged masterpiece — completed in 1775, built to the 'tower-façade' pattern with the campanile absorbed into the centre. The ribbed neoclassical dome was added in 1820 by Carmelo Cultraro, modelled deliberately on the Panthéon in Paris — so the building is a conversation across a century, a Baroque body under an Enlightenment head. Windows above the nave depict the martyrdom of St George, patron of Ibla and of the Sangiorgiani.

Built for the Benedictines in the second half of the 18th century (c.1756–96) on the site of the pre-1693 church of San Tommaso, by an architect unknown but clearly working in the circle of Rosario Gagliardi — its oval plan and tower-façade echo his San Giorgio. Little screened choir-boxes (coretti), closed with wrought-iron grilles made in 1774 by Filippo Scattarelli, let the enclosed nuns of the adjoining convent watch and hear without being seen. The whole building is choreographed around a congregation of women you were never meant to see.

Rebuilt in the 18th century after 1693, the church (dedicated to the Madonna Hodegetria, 'she who shows the way') was long tied to the Knights of Malta. Its landmark is the bell-tower, decorated near the top with a band of blue-and-yellow maiolica tiles made in the pottery town of Caltagirone, depicting vases of flowers — a bright welcome at the threshold between the upper town and Ibla.

Set on Piazza della Repubblica in the older, humbler part of Ibla nearest the descent from the upper town, the church of the Anime del Purgatorio was rebuilt after 1693. It anchors the quarter where travellers coming down the Salita Commendatore first set foot in the old town.

A Franciscan foundation of medieval origin, damaged in 1693 and rebuilt, but retaining some older Gothic-era elements — a rarity in a town almost wholly reconstructed after the quake. It stands on the northern slope of the Ibla spur.

A church of medieval origin — among the oldest in Ragusa — reduced and rebuilt after 1693, standing beside the Giardino Ibleo at the eastern tip of Ibla. It preserves a decorated wooden ceiling and remains a working parish church.

The manifesto of Ragusa Superiore. After the 1693 quake, the merchant class that founded the new grid-town on the 'piano del Patro' plateau built this cathedral to equal anything in Ibla. The first stone was laid in 1694; the monumental church rose across the 18th century and was completed around 1777 and consecrated in 1778, the work of local master-builders (its popular attribution to Rosario Gagliardi, who designed San Giorgio in Ibla, is not documented). The five-bay front carries three portals, statues of the two St Johns, two sundials of 1751, and a single left campanile some 50 m tall — the matching right tower was begun in 1820 and never finished. The terrace balustrade of 1745 is carved from dark pietra pece, the local bitumen-rich limestone. San Giovanni is the patron of the upper town and of the Sangiovannari.

Laid out as part of the post-1693 rebuilding of Ibla, the piazza was designed as a Baroque theatre-set: it climbs and narrows toward the deliberately off-centre cathedral so the building looms and turns as you approach. Around it stand the palazzi of the noble families who chose to rebuild on the old rock, and the church of San Giuseppe just off its lower end. It remains the principal gathering place of the lower town and a favourite film location.

Founded in the mid-19th century (c.1830–1850) by a circle of Iblean barons led by the Arezzo family, on the model of an English gentlemen's club — a 'conversation society' for the nobility who had refused to leave the old rock after the earthquake. Behind the sober Doric-pilastered façade the ballroom was frescoed in the French taste with an allegory of the Arts and Sciences. The writer Gesualdo Bufalino mocked such clubs for debating 'with the ambition of having the solution to everything.' It still functions as a private club today.

Inaugurated in 1858 on the rocky spur at the eastern tip of Ibla, some 385 m above the valleys, on the grounds of three former convents (the Capuchins, Dominicans and Reformed Friars). Unusually, it was created largely by the townspeople themselves — nobles and ordinary citizens working on it together, many for free. Around its edges stand three old churches, San Domenico, San Giacomo and the deconsecrated San Vincenzo Ferreri; the lone medieval Portale di San Giorgio survives at its western entrance. The Viale delle Palme is lined with about 50 Canary Island date palms.

Built in the second half of the 18th century for the Cosentini family, the palace is the finest display of the mascheroni — the grotesque under-balcony corbels that are a signature of south-eastern Sicilian late Baroque. Carved by anonymous local artisans (maestranze), the faces are at once apotropaic, warding off the evil eye, and satirical, caricaturing the townsfolk. The names given to the balconies — Maldicenza (Slander), Cantastorie (the story-singer), Benessere (Abundance), Gentiluomo (the Gentleman) — turn a nobleman's façade into a comedy of the street.

Rebuilt in 1760 by the La Rocca family on the site of their older houses, wrecked in 1693 — one of the aristocratic palaces of the families who chose to rebuild on the ancient rock rather than move to the new upper town. Its seven-odd late-Baroque balconies rest on three carved corbels each, the work of local carvers who signed their work only in their wit: musicians, caricatures, floral scenes. It now houses Ibla's tourist information office.

Home of the Arezzo di Donnafugata, one of the leading noble families of Ibla and long prominent in the town's aristocratic life — the same circle that founded the Circolo di Conversazione. The palace preserves a suite of decorated 18th–19th-century rooms and a tiny private family theatre. Baron Corrado Arezzo de Spuches, a 19th-century senator of the family, rebuilt the celebrated Castello di Donnafugata west of Ragusa.

A small historic theatre associated with the Arezzo di Donnafugata circle, part of the cultured life the Ibla nobility maintained on their rock. Restored in recent years, it again hosts a programme of music and drama.

One of the three former convent churches gathered around the Giardino Ibleo, now deconsecrated and used as a cultural auditorium. The surviving 15th-century Portale di San Giorgio stands immediately beside it.

Built in the later 18th century, Palazzo Bertini is best known for the three grotesque keystone-faces (mascheroni) over its main windows, which local tradition reads as an allegory of power: a gaunt beggar (the poor man, who fears nothing because he has nothing), a serene crowned noble (power by blood), and a turbaned, moustached Levantine merchant (power by money). Carved on the façade of the merchant-built upper town, the trio is a wry portrait of exactly the classes whose rivalry split Ragusa in two.

Built in the mid-18th century for a noble family and later owned by the Zacco, this is the showpiece Baroque palazzo of Ragusa Superiore, with elaborately carved under-balcony corbels — grinning masks, musicians and figures — showing that the taste for the grotesque mascheroni crossed the ravine from Ibla to the new upper town.

Built between 1837 and 1843 (promoted by the friar Giambattista Occhipinti Scopetta), the Ponte dei Cappuccini crosses the deep Vallata Santa Domenica on two orders of round arches — four below, ten above — about 114 m long and 40 m high, linking the San Giovanni district to the Capuchin convent across the ravine. The gorge it spans was itself the quarry that supplied the town's building stone. It is the eldest of Ragusa's three famous bridges (the others of 1937 and 1964), now restored for pedestrians.

Founded by monks in the 13th century — its Norman-era name was Santa Maria delle Cateratte, 'of the floodgates,' for its position on the lip of the gorge. The 1693 earthquake collapsed its nave and left aisle; only the right aisle survived, so the rebuild raised a new Baroque church beside it, rotated 90°, leaving a legible seam between the two ages: four pointed Gothic doorways survive along the old right wall (one crowned with a Madonna among carved flowers and beasts), and inside is a polychrome terracotta of the Death of the Virgin dated 1538, attributed to the school of the Gagini. Beneath the escarpment here, archaeologists found rock-cut tombs from around 700 BC — the deep past of Hybla Heraea. The terrace is the iconic belvedere over Ibla.

The historic pedestrian link between Ragusa Superiore and Ragusa Ibla, of medieval origin and remade after 1693 — a network of stepped alleys and archways down the escarpment past Santa Maria delle Scale. For over two centuries it joined two rival, separately-governed towns; walking it is the best way to feel the descent from the merchants' rational plateau into the aristocrats' old rock.

A modern Ibla institution rather than a historic one, famous for turning local wines, herbs and Sicilian produce into gelato — part of the granita-and-gelato culture that descends ultimately from the sherbets of Arab Sicily.