The car I hired a few days ago is one with a newfangled navigation system that talks to me. And I will never drive in a foreign country again without one. It is great. Even with it I keep getting off course. But there are aggressive drivers here and narrow streets through the towns and it allows me to watch the road. I would never in 3 hours have found my hotel in Ragusa without it.
Anyway, I have driven over into the area called Val di Noto and visited Modica and the twin cities of Ragusa. These hill towns date from the Neolithic era and were inhabited when the Greeks arrived.
The 1693 eruption of Mount Etna was so huge that it devastated the entire east of the island of Sicily. And the towns that were rebuilt were all done in the “Baroque Sicily” style. Here in the Val di Noto, Eight towns are together designated a UNESCO World Heritage site “representing the culmination and final flowering of Baroque art in Europe”.
Baroque Sicily, a little gallery from these towns:
Except for the few major through streets these are quiet towns. I wonder about their future. Probably only tourist attractions. The narrow streets, all the stone, the endless up and down steps seem to me to be serious barriers to modernization. Speaking to this I looked into it and the population of Ragusa today is roughly the same as in 1911.
Speaking about Art, how about this:
And regarding food, it is difficult to have a real dinner here. The restaurants open at 7:30 or 8PM, and if you have dinner then you have it in an empty restaurant.
Plus if you go out and have a drink to wait for the restaurants to open, then you are faced with the array of free food the bar offers, which is almost impossible (for me) to resist.
Heading west tomorrow.