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Rich vestiges of a tormented past

Santa Croce Camerina is the medieval heir of the Greek Kamarina, founded by the Syracusans in 598 B.C., as an outpost of their expansionistic policy, after Akrai and Kasmene. The Greek town had a very tormented life and in the space of about three centuries it was destroyed several times, with the consequent deportation of its inhabitants, since on account of its geographical position it found itself, as a frontier town, squashed now between Syracuse and Gela, now between Athenians and Spartans, now between Romans and Carthaginians. After its destruction by the Romans in 258 B.C., the town never recovered, and the environs turned into marshes and scrublands. A village arose on the sea at Kaucana, but this too was later destroyed by the Syracusans. There remain rich archaeological vestiges of the ancient places, partly kept at the Syracuse and Ragusa museums, and partly, above all as regards fictile objects, in the Antiquarium founded near the remains of the village of Kamarina.

The present-day village of Santa Croce Camerina arose in the Middle Ages in a place where previously there was a little church, among whose sacred images there was that of St. Helen with the cross of Christ. This cross gave the name to the settlement and then to the modern town, whose environs are rich in necropoles, like Cozzo Campisi, Dieci Saline, Randello and Passo Marinaro. An edifice with a cross layout, built with calcareous ashlars without mortar is the one known as Dammusu riMezzagnuni. The modern town, which was the marquisate of the Celestri family, has no major artistic monuments. The few that there are include the cathedral church, dedicated to St. John the Baptist, and some private buildings, such as the elegant Palazzo Pace, in art nouveau style, which is in a precarious condition.

The ruin with a cupola was already known at the end of the eighteenth century, thanks to accounts by the Prince of Biscari, lgnazio Paternò Castello, and an illustration by the French traveller Jean Houel (1776). Generally considered a religious edifice dating from somewhere between the fourth and fifth centuries, it has a Greek cross layout and a construction type (cupola linked by primeval pinnacles and crown covered with shards) in which Byzantine influences have rightly been perceived, to be connected to the important role as a harbour that nearby Caucana had taken on in that period.

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