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On the tracks of the ancient Siculi
 Giarratana is not far from the site of the ancient Cerretanum, destroyed by the 1693 earthquake. There are very ancient traces of the little town, near which there are the remains of some prehistoric villages inhabited by tribes of Siculi, on which the archaeologist Paolo Orsi carried out diggings. According to some scholars, the sites of Frbesso and Casmene are to be identified with these places. Stretches of the wall structures of the ancient villages have remained. However, it is only from the Middle Ages on, and precisely since Norman times, that we have documentary notices about Giarratana, whose historical vicissitudes are linked to numerous events regarding the history of all Sicily.
After the Angevins were driven out, one of the seigneurs of Giarratana was Gualtieri of Caltagirone. Subsequently, Giarratana became part of the county of Modica, and lastly it went to the family of Simonetto Settimo, who had an imposing castle built; the remains of the latter are still visible in the higher part of the old centre, in the Terravecchia area.
The economy of Giarratana has always been based on agriculture. It is famous In particular for the growing of a particular type of onion, to which every year a highly popular festival is dedicated.
In the centre of the little town there are some churches, including the one dedicated to SantAntonio Abate, in the higher part; in it there is kept the statue of the Madonna della Neve, patron saint of Giarratana. The Baroque San Bartolomeo church has imposing slender columns inside; there are three
naves; in its facade there are three superimposed tiers. In the Town Hall square there is the cathedral church, whose facade, very similar to that of Noto cathedral, has no right-hand campanile.
These big churches with tower-facades, typical of Iblei architecture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, afford a ‘distance effect” which marks and connotes, at the territorial level, the urban centres. Thus at Giarratana the churches dedicated to San Bartolomeo and San Giuseppe mark out the little centre. Work on both churches began in the first half of the eighteenth century but ended (with the facade) in the first decades of the nineteenth. The tower-facade theme, which incorporates the bell cell and is usually made up of imposing frames of free columns, is probably to be connected to echoes of the prestigious San Giorgio building in Ragusa.
Testi © Azienda Autonoma Provinciale per l'Incremento Turistico di Ragusa
Via Capitano Bocchieri, 33 - 97100 RAGUSA
tel. 0932 221511 - fax 0932 221555
Foto © Studio Scivoletto
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