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Ragusa provinces strikes one on account of its connotations of antiquity and the peculiarity of places in it. And one is amazed by the fact that the province was only set up in 1926. Actually, the twelve comunes that constitute its territory and that previously came under Modica ... [continue] |
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MARINA DI RAGUSA MODICA PUNTA SECCA RAGUSA / RAGUSA IBLA SANTA CROCE CAMERINA SCICLI / DONNALUCATA SCOGLITTI ________________________ Association B&B Province of Ragusa
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Have you ever seen Ibla from below, looking out from the state highway that, serpent-like, runs towards Modica? And have you ever seen Modica itself from a distance? If not, you cannot understand why, sometimes, one can be seized by such astrong desire to have a riverbed of pebbles before one’s eyes: stone wrought by the winds, dried up; dusty stone, even mouldy; stone that lives and breathes and sings as a river could that unbridled breaks forth into the bottom of a precipice...
Once on a moonlit night, I ventured down the two hundred and forty-two steps which roll down from Santa Maria delle Scale, and I went rummaging in that jumble of choking alleys which forbid entry to moonlight as they do to sunlight. From time to time there is a promised-land glimpse. a Morgan le Fay apparition, a theatre curtain trompe-l’oeil, and at the end, over everything, the immense cupola of San Giorgio, also made graceful by Ite moon, despite its incongruous neo¬classical bulk. One day I had seen Ragusa Ibla from a distant point in the San Leonardo Gully, and that day it was as if I had noticed that big umbrella for the first time. I mean: as it it was only at that moment that I had noticed that architectural anomaly. 
And indeed, this is a strange Sicily that once belonged to the Modica county: a Sicily lit up by a light resembling that of certain places in Africa and the Orient and that the intricate development of the bright white dry-stone walls succeeds in rendering even more dazzling. And what an extraordinary pictorial sense is expressed by those carobs, balsams of shadow in the countryside that the sun, in summer, seems to bite into: that pictorial sense has been photographically rendered by Enzo Sellerio, who perhaps was the first to extract, with memorable shots, all the scenic power of the Ragusa carobs, and by Giuseppe Leone, who happily and untiringly distils images from this area. And it is not by chance that we have spoken of a pictorial sense: Piero Guccione, a painter who is inspired by light and who indeed with a wonderful palette revisits “light situations”, has significantly chosen to live here. But you also feel the frontier” because the state of mind of the people in these places is so different from that of western Sicilians. The people of Ragusa have - it seems to me - more civic sense and gentler manners; manners which are far from the violent feelings that - obviously we are generalising - are expressed by big cities like Palermo and Catania, or country areas where the feudal system has survived longer.
The Comiso man Gesualdo Bufalino maintains that, in order fully to enjoy these places, the picturesque “streams of steps”, the “squares with adventurous profiles” (Ragusa, Modica, Comiso and then, moving into the Syracuse territory, Noto and Palazzolo Acreide), you must have a ‘particular quality of the soul”. But don’t worry, if you don’t have it, you can borrow it from the pages that Bufalino in his musical novel Argo II cieco devotes to Modica: “A theatre, was the town, a proscenium of pink stones, a feast of mirabila. And how scented the jasmine was as evening came down ... What a lot of bells there were in Modica, at that time, for weddings, baptisms, complines, angelus, but above all for funerals, what a lot of people died in Modica, every half hour without anyone managing to be disturbed by it you heard bursting out like thunder in the air the silvery encouraging ding-dong of death ... There were about a hundred churches in Modica and just as many bells, San Pietro, San Giuseppe, Gesù, a hundred churches, each with its breath of devout women mixed up in lime just as the smell of workman’s sweat clings to his overalls. Churches with fine carnal Baroque, with round straight columns, the spat-out legs of Maria Venera; churches with cupolas, little domes, which, if they reminded my friends of shapes of hot mustard in the clays of Caltagirone, in me aroused another more moving simile: her bright breasts, behind the button of her bodice, only half done up
...’’
