14. Modico and Noto

Tuesday, Oct 22nd.  Today we are visiting the towns of Modica and Noto and will then end up in Syracuse where we will spend the next two nights.  Here is a photo of Pat boarding our bus as we leave our hotel in Ragusa.

As we drive through the countryside we pass lots of small towns and cities.  Had I mentioned before how the Sicilians like to build their cities in the top of hills like in this example.

We arrive in the city of Modica for our first stop of the day.  Modica is famous as the city where they make the best chocolates and we are going to be visiting a chocolate shop and seeing how they make it.  But first here is the Duomo of Modica.

Here is the main altar.

 We couldn't take any other photos in the Duomo as there was a wake service going on in one of the side altars.  As we walked down the main street, most of the houses had balconies overlooking the street and the support beams under the balconies were interesting as you can see in this photo.

Here is the sign for the chocolate shop we visited.  Antica Dolceria translates as antique sweet shop and it is run by the Bonajuto family.  It was established in 1880 by Francesco Bonajuto and makes various cookies and other sweets but what it's famous for is chocolate.  All of its products are made using antique methods, hence its name.  In particular, the chocolate is made using techniques developed by the Aztecs.

Chocolate was brought to Sicily by the Spanish who ruled Sicily at that time.  The Spanish got chocolate and the methods of producing it from the Aztecs of South America and these are the techniques that this shop uses.  Here is a photo of an Aztec cocoa grinding stone called a 'metate'.

The cocoa beans are ground, sugar and spice, typically vanilla or cinnamon, is added and the mixture is heated to a low temperature that melts the cocoa butter but not the sugar crystals.  The chocolate they make has only three ingredients: cocoa, sugar and spice.  No vegetable fats, milk products or lecithin is added. After the mixture is liquid it is poured out onto a slab and measured out.  That is what is happening in this next photo.

It is then transferred into small pans or forms as you can see in this next photo.

The next step is to pound or shake the forms to settle the chocolate, work our any trapped air and to get the cocoa butter to form a smooth surface.  Here is a video of this process.

At this point we got to sample the chocolate and boy was it chocolatey and good.  Because they only heat it enough to melt the cocoa butter but not the sugar, it is slightly gritty.  They also make some marzipan in this shop and here is some drying.

We then went out into the sales area and they had samples for us to try of various chocolates ranging from 100% on down and with various spices.  I tried the 100% and it is tart to say the least.  The 80% and 90% were both outstanding.  Here we are milling around smartly as we try various samples.

The web site for this chocolate shop can be found at: http://www.bonajuto.it/en/

Next, we visited the city of Noto.  Noto is famous for its baroque buildings of the early 18th-century, but the town is much older than that as it goes back to before the Greeks when the ancient Sicils settled in the area. However, this area of Sicily had a major earthquake in 1693 and as a result the city had to be rebuilt from the ground up.  Here we are at the gate to the city.

Noto is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Here we are on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele  which is the main street through town where the cathedral and the town hall are located.

Here is the Chiesa di San Francesco all'Immacolata with what was once the Franciscan convent to the right.  The convent is currently being used as a school.

Here is the Chiesa di San Domenico with a very ornate Baroque facade.

These two photos are of some of the balconies on one of the palaces.  Each balcony has a unique theme for its supports.  If you look at the wrought iron hand rails on these balconies you will see that the vertical pieces are curved and bowed out on the bottom half.  This was not just for style.  Back in those times, ladies wore elaborate dresses with large skirts.  If the balcony railing was straight and the lady approached the edge of the balcony, the skirt would be forced back and the back of the skirt would rise up.  They couldn't have that so the railings were bowed out to make room for the voluminous skirts.

Here is the facade of the main church in town, the Cattedrale di San Nicolò di Mira which was finished in 1703.  



Unfortunately in 1990 there was an earthquake which at the time they did not think did any significant damage to the church.  However, there were apparently some cracks that were not detected that let water infiltrate the structure and in 1996, luckily in the middle of the night, the roof over the central nave and half of the dome collapsed.  Here is a photo of the result of that collapse.



The roof and dome have been replaced and reconstruction on the inside of the church is proceeding as can be seen in this photo in the main nave with the main altar in the background.

Here is a close up of the artwork over the main altar.

Here is a photo of the rebuilt dome.

Here is one of the side altars that was not damaged in the collapse.

Right across the street from the cathedral was the Ducezio Palace, the current town hall, which was designed by Vincenzo Sinatra.

One thing they do have in Noto is a better quality of beggar.  Here is a photo of a young woman begging on the streets.  You can see her basket for donations on the ground in front of her.  She just sat there not saying anything but she would smile at you if you looked her way.

Lastly, here is a photo of the monument to the men of Noto who died in WW I.

From Noto we drove to Syracuse where we will spend the next two nights.

13. Agrigento, Caltagirone and Ragusa

Monday, Oct 21st.  This morning after breakfast we all piled onto the bus to go to Agrigento.  This city is renowned as the location of the ancient Greek city of Akragas.  The city was founded around 580 BC by Greek colonists from Gela.  It prospered and became one of the richest and most famous of the Greek colonies in Magna Graecia under the sixth-century tyrants Phalaris and Theron and became a democracy when Theron's son was overthrown.  The democracy was overthrown in 406 BC when it was sacked by the Carthaginians.  The city was disputed between the Romans and the Carthaginians during the First Punic War. The Romans laid siege to the city in 262 BC and captured it after defeating a Carthaginian relief force in 261 BC and sold the population into slavery. Although the Carthaginians recaptured the city in 255 BC the final peace settlement gave Sicily to Rome. It suffered badly during the Second Punic War (218-201 BC) when both Rome and Carthage fought to control it. The Romans eventually captured Akragas in 210 BC and renamed it Agrigentum, although it remained a largely Greek-speaking community for centuries thereafter.  After the fall of the Roman Empire, the city passed into the hands of the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy and then the Byzantine Empire. In 828 AD the Saracens captured the city.  Agrigento was captured by the Normans under Count Roger I in 1087, who established a Latin bishopric there.

On the way from Sciacca to Agrigento we passed a lot of interesting scenery.  Much of the landscape was rocky and not well suited for farming as in this photo.

This looks almost looks like a photo of a small town but it's not.  It's a cemetery.  The Sicilians believe in family crypts and so this cemetery is built that way.  Each family crypt will have a number of burial niches for family members.  When the niches get full, they take the oldest remains and move them to a common area within the crypt to free a niche up for the new burial.

The country has been invaded and raided so much over history that the tendency is for all town to be built on the top of a hill as can be seen in this photo.

We spent a lot of time touring old baroque churches but they do have new modern ones as can be seen in this photo.

We've arrived at Agrigento and once again you can see that it is built on top of a hill for defensive purposes.  However, we are not going into the town but to the Greek ruins which are where the town used to be before the Arabs started invading.

What we will be visiting is the "Valley of the Temples" which is a misnomer as it is actually ridge rather then a valley.  This compromises a large sacred area south of the city where seven monumental Greek temples in the Doric style were constructed during the 6th and 5th centuries BC.  Now excavated and partly restored, they constitute the largest and best-preserved ancient Greek buildings outside of Greece itself.  The first temple is the Temple of Juno that was built in the 5th-century BC and burned by the Carthaginians in 406 BC.  It was usually used for the celebrations of weddings.  Here are a couple of photos of this temple.

Greek temples were not used the way we use churches and temples today.  The sacrificial altar was outside the temple in front of the entrance (the front of the temple always faced east) and the only people who went into the temple were the priests.  The sacrificial animals (bulls typically) would be killed on the altar and the meat would be divided up between the people, the priests and the gods.  The temples and the altars were made out of limestone as you can see from the evidence of this sea shell embedded in the limestone of the altar out in front of the temple.

The view from the temple site was great, that is the Mediterranean Sea and if your eyes were good enough and it was clear enough you could see Africa.

As we walked down the ridge there were the remains of the old defensive walls along the edge of the ridge.  Some were natural stone formations and others were built up. The hemispherical holes in the walls are burial niches that early Christians dug into the walls to bury their dead.  Some of them as you can see in the second photo were fairly big.  They refer to this large one as a family niche.

We next came to this olive tree which has been dated as being over 1,000 years old.

The next temple we came to is the best preserved and is the called the Temple of Concordia.  That name comes from a Roman inscription that was found at the site.  No one knows what the original Greek name for this temple was.  It is the best preserved as it was turned into a Catholic church in the 6th-century AD.  These next two photos show the east and west ends of the temple.

Our guide pointed out that the columns on the front and rear of the temple look vertical but they are not.  The Greeks understood perspective and gave a slight taper to the design so that it would look straight to the human eye.  The typical design of these temples consisted of 6 columns across the front, 13 columns down the sides and an interior room with solid walls as in this sketch.

When they changed it over to a church they cut arches through the interior walls as can be seen in my second photo and erected filler walls between the exterior columns to enclose the church.  These filler walls were removed during the restoration but the arch openings are still there.

The next thing we came across was some old Christian catacombs that had been dug under the grounds but are now exposed.

Next was the remains of the Temple of Heracles which today consists of eight columns only.

It is amazing that any of these temples are standing as the Greeks didn't use mortar to hold the pieces together.  The columns are made from stacked disks.  To keep them aligned they chiseled square holes in each disk and then inserted a key.  Here is a photo of some of these disks and you can see the square key holes.

To raise the blocks to the tops of the columns, they used tripods with ropes.  They cut notches into the ends of the blocks for these ropes.  In this photo you can see a couple of these blocks with the rope notches.

Finally we came to the largest of the temples appropriately dedicated to Zeus.  Unfortunately, other then a few columns and piles of rubble there is not much to see of the temple as you can see in the next two photos.

One of the problems that the archaeologists have in trying to restore these temples is that the local people found that the ruins of these temples were a great source of building material for new construction.  Time and again as we visited these ruins that was a common problem and it made restoration very difficult if not impossible.

One of the things that was unique to this Temple of Zeus was the statues of giants that, along with the columns, held up the roof of the temple.  Here is a photo of a partially restored statue lying on the ground.

After lunch we headed to the hilltop town of Caltagirone.  The name of this town comes from the Arabic "qal'at-al-jarar" and roughly means castle of pottery jars.  The residents of Caltagirone have been making pottery from at least the 2nd-century BC and that is why we are visiting here to learn about ceramics and maybe buy a souvenir.  Here we are with our local guide in the ceramics shop of Francesco Navanzino and Sons with samples of their ceramics.

We then went on a tour of the Shops where they make the pottery.  Here is one of the brothers painting a pitcher prior to it being fired in the kilns.

Next we had a demonstration of how they use a pottery wheel to make a vase.  You can link to the video by clicking on this image.

The narration is being translated by our tour guide.  This again is one of the brothers and at the end he cut the vase in half so we could see what the inside looked like.

After this we headed to the town of Ragusa where we will spend the night at the Poggio del Sole resort.  However, along the way we came across a number of German pillboxes left over from WW II.  Here is a photo of one.

The area around Ragusa is famous for the walls that separate farmers fields as they are built without mortar or concrete and really look neat as you can see in this photo.