When more Baroque is barely enough…

A quiet Sunday – time for an outing to another Baroque town. First, we have to negotiate with TomTom and the streets of Modica, not a fun exercise, when Tom wants to take us down one-way streets just barely wide enough for our little car. After five minutes thinking that we are going to lose one of our mirrors on an unforgiving stone wall, or collect someone’s washing, M opts for ignoring all sage advice from Tom and choosing only wider streets that are clearly going somewhere, no matter where said streets may be going. It works – we go up and then come down on what are clearly the main traffic routes up and down the hill, and we thankfully head out of Modica to Scicli, a small town which was also destroyed by the 1693 earthquake.

We have no map of Scicli (pronounced shee-clee), and only rudimentary tourist information, a dangerous combo, but we are lucky. The town is small enough that we can safely drive and park conveniently close to centro storico, the historic centre of the town.

And then, a car meet! Dozens of Fiat Bambini spruced up and on display.  M loves it, and takes multiple snaps for Danny. [M: It was great – everything from faithfully restored to hotted-up mini-Ferraris to a couple of little electric Fiats.]

This was the largest collection of CLEAN cars that I have seen here.  Mostly, it is only the windscreen that is cleaned in Sicily (you get that for free when you fill up)!

Scicli was nice – smaller than the big ticket centres, so it was easy to navigate, but with several beautiful piazzas, palazzos and chiesas. 

 

We tried to explore the old church above the town, but it proved to be an off-limits building site.

 

From Scicli to the Cave d’Ispica and the first disappointment of the day -  the Arab/Norman Fortezza we’d come to see was closed! 

 

So we ended up doing a walk along the gorge there, which was nice, but not in the same league as the walks we’ve been doing recently.  Still, its a different experience doing a bushwalk while sampling medlar from the trees (and other fruit that looked like a mandarin but was utterly bitter!). There were remnants of cave dwellings in the cliffs, and we saw our third snake – about 1 m long and black – (a viper?).

Back in Modica, the highlight of the day was going to dinner.  Not the dinner you understand, but the going there…  On the way to dinner we passed the Chiesa San Giorgio (aka the Church of St George). As we did so, its bells started pealing and we could hear men in the church shouting!  It sounded just like a crowd at a football match! There were other people inside, so we sidled in to see what was going on, and suddenly a large statue of St George, his horse, his sword and the dragon took off up the church aisle, carried by about a score of large, running (well, shuffling), shouting men!  The statue was huge – these guys were working hard! They charged by us, narrowly missing a chandelier with George’s sword, turned and charged back down the church, shouting all the way! 

The next 20 minutes was spent watching them trying to hoist St George, his horse, his sword and the dragon back up into the niche where they reside.  You don’t often get a show like that on the way to dinner!  We’ve done some research since, and apparently in the culmination of this celebration, the team of men run George (and his horse, sword and dragon) around the town until they are exhausted. So perhaps what we saw was a training run!

Oh, and dinner was great, too!