• Category: Travel Tips
• Add Comment

Sicily's ancient hill towns are Greek or even earlier in origin: the Norman knights marching westwards on their conquest fortified the towns; then feudal barons expanded, adorned and exploited them.

Modern life has not passed them by but a lack of space on the hilltops means that high-rise apartment buildings have been confined to the lower slopes, while the upper neighbourhoods retain much of their old-fashioned flavour. We are on a short break, combining the absolute peace and quiet of the estate of San Giovanni Sgadari with local towns, which we found charming when we first visited 20 years ago.

We set off to the east and to the towns of Nicosia and Sperlinga. Of obscure classical origin, Nicosia became a town in the Byzantine era and then an important fortress under the Saracens. At the end of the 11th century, the wife of the Great Count Roger, who led the Norman invasion of Sicily, encouraged people from her native Lombardy to settle there. This ignited a fierce rivalry between the Greek-speaking natives who gathered to pray in the church of San Nicola, and the Catholic northerners who spoke a Gallic dialect and built themselves a church called Santa Maria Maggiore. The two communities lived side by side in mutual dislike well into the 20th century, and the local dialect is still quite incomprehensible to other Sicilians.

Continue reading Sicily's ancient hilltop towns

• Submitted by
  
  harriet
• 10/21/09
• Email a friend