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The Gully Civilisation

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, in Syracuse province, all appear connected, with chequered vicissitudes of separation and re-connection, to the history of the prestigious Modica county of the Chiaramontes and Cabreras, which from the fourteenth century on was like a state within the state, on account of the ample autonomy that it enjoyed. In it there was strong cultural unity because there was a single dialect in Sicily and also because of the presence of a widespread rural bourgeoisie made up of small landowners and tenant farmers: the latter transformed the Ibla plateau and set up farms for corn growing and cattle raising, and they traced out a dense network of dry-stone walls built to allow agrarian rotation and grazing in a semi-wild state of a bovine breed which was particularly rustic and versatile: the so-called “Modicana” breed.

Count Cabrera's idea

In the middle of the fifteenth century, Count Cabrera had the happy idea of giving plateau lands in emphyteusis to his subjects so that they would break up the soil, against payment in kind of a modest quantity of corn, and thus getting the twelve thousand salme of corn that he had the privilege of exporting in franchise. This led to a population explosion in the area, with the major urban growth of Ragusa and Modica. the subsequent colonisation of the Bosco Piano plateau and the foundation of Vittoria by the last heiress of the Cabreras, Vittoria Colonna. From this period of great development there remain late Gothic architectural vestiges, and in particular splendid portals at Scicli, in the Croce convent, in Modica in the Santa Maria di Gesù church, and in Ragusa in the portal of the old San Giorgio church and a whole nave in the Santa Maria delle Scale church.

So the characteristics of the province are determined by the country and the Ibla plateau, the ‘plain’, as it is called. This is a triangular calcareous tableland with its vertex to the north and its base to the south, in the direction of the Mediterranean, further divided by the deep groove of the river lrminio into the Modica plain and the Ragusa plain.

The 1693 earthquake

The displacement of the calcareous rise by over 500 metres sharply divides the plateau from the Comiso and Vittoria plain, which also includes the Acate territory and a large part of that of Chiaramonte. And so the territory of the province can be divided into three zones: the Vittoria plain, the hill zone which includes the comunes of Giarratana and Monterosso Almo, and the plateau zone including the comunes of Ragusa, Santa Croce Camerina, Modica, Scicli, Ispica and Pozzallo.

In the latter, the calcareous tableland appears to be uniformly affected by erosion, producing the “cave” or gullies which, ever since prehistoric times, have given rise to rock settlements whose culture has been defined as “the gully civilisation”. It started with the Siculi, who, several centuries before the Greek colonisation, settled at the confluence of the waterways. Cava d’Ispica, with its fifteen km. of grottoes, bears witness to the persistence of this civilisation until the 1693 earthquake.

The ruins of this Sicilian Pompei tell us of how “gully civilisation” and feudal system blended together during the Middle Ages. The 1693 earthquake shook this world to the very roots, but while Ispica, a part of Ragusa and Giarratana sought a better position with respect to the territory and communication routes, Modica and other places in the county were reconstructed on the old sites. This did not produce a major difference in town layout, but in the long term was decisive for future development.

The Baroque acropoles

So the earthquake did not produce a new conception of spatial layout, but, with reconstruction, made it possible to give full vent to the desire for monumental representation that the Baroque vision had sought to assert during the seventeenth century in apposition to leftovers from the past, often creating, according to Vittorini’s happy intuition, “Baroque acropoles”, now no longer dominated by the old castles but by the grandiose masses of. the new cathedral churches. At Scicli there is San Matteo; in Mod ica and Ragusa, the two San Giorgio churches. All three churches are united by the singular destiny of being the last swansong of the losers in the struggle between different factions, partly religious and partly social and political, that split the three towns, with major consequences for reconstruction. At Scicli the rebuilt cathedral church was even to be abandoned, together with the rock settlements in the hill, and the town was to move slightly downhill with the different positon of the new Sant’lgnazio cathedral church. In Modica the new direction of the expansion, privileging the bottom of the valley, was to be followed by the new nobility aggregating around the rival San Pietro parish Lastly, in Ragusa the oldest nobility attached to San Giorgio, deciding to rebuild the town on the ancient site, were to clash with the San Giovanni “farmers”, who, headed by sagacious leaders belonging to the new nobility which had derived from the emphyteusis bourgeoisie, was to build on the nearby “Patro plain’ the new town, with an orthogonal layout, around the San Giovanni Battista church, built by the same people, Mario Spata and Rosario Boscarino, that had done San Pietro in Modica. And it is comprehensible that to them the most cultivated and refined San Giorgio people opposed Rosario Gagliardi, a prestigious Val di Noto architect who in 1744 in Ragusa designed what was to be his masterpiece, above all on account of the harmonious facade-tower solution, which in San Giorgio in Modica has its most picturesque expression.

But while with its “attachment” to the gully, Modica shut itself off from the prospect of better development, the choice made by a part of the population of Ragusa to found a new town was to prove a particularly happy one, leading to a new and more productive rapport with the territory, because of greater ease of communication and greater vicinity to the mineral resources which were later to be discovered: asphalt in 1849 and oil in 1953. Hence Ragusa has been through the experience of both choices: that of continuing the way of life of the “gully civilisation” and that of facing the adventurous conquest of new relations with the “plain” territory. Lastly, in recent decades all the coastal area has witnessed the formation of extremely important specialised agriculture, connected with greenhouse early fruit and vegetables, for which Vittoria has become the biggest production centre in the whole country.

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