Ragusa Ibla

Where it sits. Ragusa Ibla is the lower and older half of Ragusa, capital of the province of the same name in southeastern Sicily. It occupies a narrow limestone spur that juts east between two gorges, the Cava San Leonardo and the Cava Santa Domenica, roughly 400 metres above sea level and about 120 metres below the modern upper town, Ragusa Superiore, which sits on the plateau opposite. The two are joined by three bridges and by the Santa Maria delle Scale staircase, some 340 steps that drop down the cliff face and give the classic view of Ibla — a hive of grey-gold roofs and blue church domes packed onto a ridge, with terraced ravines falling away on both sides.

The story behind it. The 1693 earthquake destroyed Ragusa completely and produced an argument rather than a plan. The aristocracy and the older families chose to rebuild in place on the medieval spur; a rival faction built a wholly new, gridded town on the plateau above. Both won, which is why Ragusa is two towns with two cathedrals and, for two centuries, was two separate municipalities — they were only merged administratively in 1926. Ibla is therefore an eighteenth-century Baroque town laid over a medieval street plan, with alleys that twist and dead-end as they did before the earthquake, and a claimed fifty churches inside roughly one square kilometre. It carries the 2002 UNESCO listing for the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto.

What you actually see today. The Duomo di San Giorgio, built between 1738 and 1775 to Rosario Gagliardi's design, closes the sloping Piazza Duomo at the top of a broad, kinked flight of steps; its convex three-tier façade with a bell tower built into the centre is the defining image of Sicilian Baroque, and the neoclassical dome was added in 1820. Down the street, the Circolo di Conversazione of 1850 is a private gentlemen's club whose neoclassical salon can sometimes be seen from the doorway. At the eastern tip, the Giardino Ibleo, opened in 1858, is a formal public garden with palm avenues, three churches inside its walls and a viewing terrace over the valley; beside it stands the Catalan-Gothic portal of San Giorgio Vecchio, all that survived of the pre-earthquake church. Palazzo Cosentini and Palazzo La Rocca carry the same grotesque balcony corbels found in Scicli and Noto.

On screen. Ibla is the visual heart of Il commissario Montalbano. Across two decades of RAI episodes the piazza in front of San Giorgio, the Circolo di Conversazione, the Giardino Ibleo and the lanes between them stand in for the fictional Vigàta and its neighbouring Montelusa. Camilleri's novels place Vigàta on the Agrigento coast, near his native Porto Empedocle, but the production moved the whole invented geography 130 kilometres east to the Val di Noto because it looked the part, and the series in turn made Ibla one of the most visited small centres in Sicily. Individual buildings carry particular functions in the show — the Vigàta police station is Scicli's town hall, the commissioner's office is Palazzo Iacono in Scicli, and Montalbano's seafront house is at Punta Secca — while Ibla supplies the street world in which the characters move.

Getting there and timing. Ragusa has a station on the slow Syracuse-Gela line and bus links to Catania, Comiso airport and the coast; the useful detail is that everything arrives in the upper town. From there, city buses 11 and 33 loop down to Ibla every twenty to thirty minutes, or the Santa Maria delle Scale steps take about twenty minutes down and considerably longer back up. Driving into Ibla is possible but parking is scarce and the lanes are tight. The town is essentially inaccessible to wheelchairs — steps, gradients and cobbles throughout — though the Giardino Ibleo and the Piazza Duomo itself are flatter than the approach suggests.

When to come. April to June and September to October give warm stone and clear evenings; the Ibla Buskers festival takes over the lanes for a weekend in October, and the piazza is floodlit at night year-round, which is when the façade of San Giorgio is at its most theatrical. July and August are hot and the town works better after six in the evening than at midday. Restaurants in Ibla are unusually good for a town of this size, including two long-standing Michelin-starred kitchens, so dinner is worth planning rather than improvising. The local table leans on the Iblei uplands as much as the sea: ricotta from the Modicana cattle, caciocavallo ragusano cheese, wild greens, and the Cerasuolo di Vittoria red from the plain to the northwest.