All articles about Ragusa & Modica

About Ragusa & Modica

This corner of the south-east exists in its present form because of a catastrophe. The 1693 earthquake levelled the whole Val di Noto, and the towns that went back up were rebuilt from nothing in the late Baroque style of the moment — which is why eight of them, Ragusa and Modica included, are collectively a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Very few places in Europe were rebuilt this completely, this consistently, in one architectural language.

Ragusa is really two towns. Ragusa Ibla, the lower old town, was rebuilt on the original site by residents who refused to move; Ragusa Superiore, above it, was built new on the ridge by those who wanted a fresh start. They are connected by several hundred steps, and walking down from the upper town into Ibla at dusk is the single best thing to do here.

Modica's fame is edible. Chocolate is worked cold here, a method that arrived with the Spanish from the Aztec world and never modernised, so the sugar never dissolves and the result is grainy and intense rather than smooth. It is not a marketing story invented for tourists — the technique is genuinely the reason the chocolate tastes the way it does.

The area is quieter than Taormina or Ortigia and works best over two or three days with a car. Scicli, the third of the Baroque towns, gets a fraction of the visitors of the other two and is worth the twenty-minute drive.