Is Sicily home to the world’s most beautiful city?

( The Times – 2006 – Maggie O’Farrell )

Author Maggie O’Farrell braves the winding roads of Sicily to explore its southeastern corner, where she is delighted by picture-perfect Syracuse

I have been on what is quite reasonably cited as the world’s most dangerous road, a crumbling track through the Bolivian jungle. On one side were furious, gushing waterfalls and on the other a sheer drop. Whenever we passed one of those little roadside shrines that marked where previous vehicles had slid over the edge, the bus driver removed his hands from the steering wheel to cross himself.

This, however, was not nearly so frightening as driving myself in a Fiat Punto to the southeastern tip of Sicily. Coming from the northern coast of Palermo and Cefalù, you are lulled into a false sense of security by motorways built with EU cash. These roads veer, tilt and stand high on their concrete stilts. Driving along them is like piloting a plane, and somewhere down below Sicily and its volcanic peaks flit past.

But then, around Piazza Armerina, you have to leave behind these spanking new dreams of modern transportation. Suddenly, towns appear over the horizon, stacked precariously on the craggy slopes. They are golden and seem to glow in the sun.

From the uneven silhouettes of these small hillside towns protrude baroque cupolas, soaring campaniles, ornate façades. This may be the country’s southernmost tip, it may be closer to Tunisia than most of its motherland, it may have been colonised and recolonised and repatriated and reunified more times than anyone can remember, but these skylines unfailingly remind you: this is Italy.

After the rigours of the journey, Modica is the perfect place for letting off steam. The town occupies a gorge and its main street, Corso Umberto, is constructed over a river bed. The buildings rear up on each side. This is a town not of streets but of staircases. Modica was once the region’s leading town.

Taken by the Spanish in the late 14th century, it was placed under the jurisdiction of the Cabrera family, who also had stakes in South America. There are remnants of this cultural cross-pollination in Modica today, and not only in the architecture (there is a flavour of Valparaiso in the ironwork balconies). On the north side of Corso Umberto, a shop sells chocolate made to an Aztec formula.

Conscious of my role as a journalist, I selflessly and conscientiously sample every flavour on offer. “Cioccolata degli Aztechi,” the packaging reads, alongside a baffling portrait of someone who looks like one of the Mitford sisters. The ingredients are the very essence of minimalism: cocoa beans and sugar.

The difference, the woman who runs the shop tells me, is all in the beans being cold-pressed. The result is a grainy, crumbly texture, surprisingly light after its modern-day equivalent, which is laden with oils and fats. The Modicans mix in different spices — vanilla, cinnamon and chilli pepper — which pack a punch in the aftertaste.

I spend several days in Modica, revelling in the perfect synthesis of delicious chocolate and a calorie-burning stair-climb to obtain it, before I decide that it’s time to tear myself away.

The drive from Modica to Noto takes me through orchards of carob trees and thickets of fruit-bearing cacti. The roads are mountainous and double — then triple — back on themselves. The farmers, crammed into tiny pick-ups, eat ice-cream as they drive.

The earth is dry and scorched. On the way, I manage to find the Cava d’Ispica, a labyrinthine network of Neolithic cave dwellings and catacombs. We go to look at one of the burial chambers — a dank, curving cave, pitted with boxy, coffin-shaped holes. There is something very careful in the way that they are tessellated, smaller child-sized ones fitted between the larger.

The entire southeastern region of Sicily was devastated by an earthquake in 1693, when most settlements were reduced to little more than dust. Different towns dealt with this in different ways. In Ragusa they built an entirely new town farther down the hill, but some stubborn aristocrats refused to abandon the rubble of their personal palazzi and decided to rebuild the old town from scratch. The result is a lovely place with a split personality.

The people of Noto, however, had a different idea. Only a week after the earthquake, the architect Giuseppe Lanza was commissioned to design an entire new town. He didn’t skimp on grandeur. Noto is constructed on a grid system in opulent baroque style. Mundane administrative buildings are fronted with wide columns and sweeping steps. The streets are laid with parallel lines of marble, which conspire with the decreasing heights of lintels to create optical illusions of vanishing points.

The most bizarre thing about Noto, and about the whole area, is its emptiness. I walked around its intersecting right-angled streets for hours and didn’t see another tourist. How, I wondered, can people resist this? Where is everyone? When I get to Syracuse the next day, I begin to understand. Syracuse, along with its adjoining island of Ortygia, is possibly the most beautiful city I have ever seen. You wander across the trapezoid-shaped main square, down a narrow alleyway, catching a glimpse of the restless sea through the buildings, past a rose-tinted church with matching cupola, and when you reach a tiny piazza with a lush, bubbling fountain inhabited by impossibly white ducks you just want to say: “Oh, come on.”

Tourists are drawn here like iron filings to a magnet. Ortygia is perfect. It’s hot, but not too hot, with the breeze coming off the sea. You can catch a boat across the bay to a beach or you can wander about the narrow streets. You can descend 20 yards (18m) into the ground to see a room carved out of rock in Byzantine times to form a Jewish ritual bath. You can cross to the mainland to climb the serried seats of an ancient Greek theatre in which 16,000 people once watched the first performances of plays by Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus.

Go to Syracuse, by all means, but don’t be put off venturing further afield. You won’t be sorry. You just need to buy a road map first. And prepare to surrender yourself to luck and the kindness of strangers.