THE GREAT earthquake of 1693 shattered most of the cities of south-eastern Sicily; it is to the spirited process of architectural renewal that the enduring interest of these is due. Catania is the grandest, her public buildings and palaces locked in an ambitious grid of streets. Noto is the most celebrated, ruthlessly moved towards the coast from its ancient site in the hills and laid out in a coherent plan that perfectly expressed the social patterns of the time and was realized by a succession of accomplished local architects, notably Rosario Gagliardi. Modica boasts the greatest of Gagliardi’s churches and an impressive procession of palaces, while nearby Scicli is studded with baroque churches of inexhaustible charm. Yet none of these towns has quite the magic of Ragusa, where the old town and the new happily coexist.
Rosario Gagliardi, San Giorgio, 1738 onwards.
The new town is to the west, an ordered plan with the substantial cathedral begun in 1706 but not finished until 1760, its façade oddly overbearing. The main road twists eastwards through the town down to the church of Santa Maria delle Scale, from where there is a splendid view over the promontory below, on which the earlier town, Ragusa Ibla, perches. Steps descend from the church steeply to the narrowest point, overlooked by the spectacularly placed church of the Purgatorio. The pretty pilastered façade, raised above a wide flight of steps, is, as it were, the frontispiece to the old town. Nearby are a number of palaces including that of the Cosentini family, with particularly ingenious corbels supporting the obligatory balconies.
The main road follows the northern flank of the hill, but you should try to lose your way in the maze of passageways and streets behind the Purgatorio. Eventually you will reach Gagliardi’s extraordinary Duomo, dedicated to Saint George and designed in 1738, as drawings in the sacristy still attest. The soaring tiered façade of golden stone dominates the narrow central piazza. It is a wonderfully resilient statement of renewed faith in the destroyed town, although the more economical interior fails to live up to the dramatic promise of the entrance front.
At the further end of the piazza is a charming neoclassical survival, the Circolo della Conversazione, the façade with fluted Doric pilasters. It was here that the local gentry met, the inhabitants of the many palaces, mostly of modest scale, whose great-grandparents had been addicted to the corbelled balconies on which their masons lavished such inventive attention. To the east are two other buildings of particular interest. The nearer is the church of San Giuseppe: the façade, though smaller and less spectacularly placed than that of the Duomo, is in some respects more sophisticated, rising inexorably in serpentine tiers. The canopied window above the door is flanked by columns that bear the stepped-out broken triple-arched belfry. The elliptical interior has a particular charm. Further east, the front of San Giorgio Vecchio is a Quattrocento Gothic survivor of the earthquake, Catalan in style, a precious reminder of Sicily’s long adherence to the house of Aragon.
It is for these monuments that the visitor is drawn to Ragusa Ibla, but the whole town, renewed so lovingly on its sloping ridge, has a strange magic, not least when afternoon light lengthens the shadows and sharpens our perception of the way the site itself sits in what remains a relatively untrammelled landscape.
Attributed to Rosario Gagliardi, San Giuseppe.