Ragusa Ibla

A dog at Palermo Central Station. He was fine, just very, very sleepy,
and obviously having some good dreams.
Even suitcases being rolled close by didn't faze him.

We left Cefalù by train yesterday morning, headed to Palermo to catch a bus to Ragusa. The bus terminal is located next to Palermo Central Station, so this part was easy. 

We had read that the Sicilian bus system is confusing, and now we know that this is no exaggeration. Most of the bus companies have ticket offices where you would expect them to be: at the bus terminal. Unfortunately the company we were looking for (AST) was nowhere to be found. One of the bus employees told us to go back to the train station to find AST, but we didn’t find it there, either. Finally, a kiosk clerk, using sign language and Italian, indicated that AST was somewhere down the street. We finally found it a couple blocks away, tucked inside a coffee shop. If I’d been traveling alone, I would have gone to the airport at this point, and flown home. But Gary is a tenacious traveler: he searches until he finds things, and I gratefully trot along behind. 

The 4-hour bus ride from Palermo to Ragusa (in the southeast corner of the island), bisects the island of Sicily, and we were eager to see what the inner part of Sicily looks like. We were surprised to find that the middle isn’t dotted with picturesque little villages and farms, as we had envisioned, but is a vast unpopulated area of green hills and even a couple of snowy-topped mountains. Sheep are the main inhabitants. It’s stunning and green, and nearly treeless. It was impossible, though, to get good photos from the bus, as it was a bumpy ride. 

Toward the end of the bus trip, towns became more frequent, and the ride became even more arduous, with all the things I dread in a bus ride: switchbacks, bad roads, land dropping down away from the road. I trusted our driver, though (for whatever reason; he just looked reliable, I guess), and whenever my eyes were open, I was treated to the sights of fields of artichokes, olive orchards, lemon and orange trees full of fruit, grape vineyards, mysterious and lovely ruins of stone buildings in the middle of sheep paddocks. 

We arrived intact in Ragusa, and were picked up at the bus station by a young Italian man with the finest eyebrows and eyes I’ve ever seen. He is on the staff of the Pomelia company, a local Air Bnb firm, and we got a ride in the little company van to our apartment: an all-white, IKEA-inspired wonder of a place that looks like this:

and this:

and this:

and, best of all, it has a balcony overlooking the town of Ragusa Ibla (the old part of Ragusa):  

After showing us how everything worked in our apartment, Dream Eyes kindly offered us a ride to the supermarket, which we accepted.  We bought bread and sharp provolone cheese, a scoop of olives, tomatoes and basil and butter and milk, and walked back to our apartment to relax and enjoy the view the rest of the evening (and watch Downton Abbey on YouTube). 

(I just have to say something more about the cheese. It’s possible that everyone knows this already except us, but we have just learned that auricchio provolone is an aged, very sharp  — it bites you back! — excellent provolone that we discovered by accident at the tiny supermarket near our B&B in Cefalù. We didn’t know what we were buying at the time, but it looked good, so we got some. We’ve since learned that it’s regarded as one of the best-tasting provolones in the world, and we can vouch for that. It’s the cheese you see dangling by a rope in Italian markets.)  

This morning we awoke in our all-white apartment, and after a leisurely morning we set out to explore Ragusa Ibla. 

The history of Ragusa goes back to the 2nd millennium B.C. — that’s millienium, not century. To put it in perspective, the 2nd millennium B.C. was when the alphabet was developed, the chariot was invented, and Athens was founded. Ragusa was settled by the Sicels (the ones who gave Sicily its name) around that general time. The town’s history is the history of Sicily in a nutshell:  at one time or another it was run by Greeks, Romans & Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, the Kingdom of Sicily, a noble family called Chiaramonte (who claimed they were descended from Charlemagne), and a few others. In 1693 the city was hit by an earthquake, which nearly leveled it, and killed over 5,000 residents. The city we are now looking down at from our all-white apartment was rebuilt on top of the ruined city, mostly in Baroque style. It's beautiful, and they light it up at night to show it off. 

To get to Ragusa Ibla, we walked down a series of twisty stairways and steps and under archways and bridges, to the bottom of the deep ravine that separates the old town from the “new”. We saw interesting architectural touches . . .

. . . this woman getting her groceries delivered by dangling a basket from her balcony . . .

. . . this little shop where the adorable proprietor was offering 3 hand-painted refrigerator magnets for 5 euros, and where we bought our first Sicilian souvenirs . . .

 . . . and eventually we found ourselves in front of the Cathedral of St. Giorgio at the top of the hill. 

This cathedral honors St. George,the dragon-slayer:

and has the biggest beeswax candles we've ever seen.

From there, we found a gelato shop and took a selfie:

. . . and made our way around the town on a maze of narrow streets, finding visual treasures around every corner.

There were very few tourists in town, just a couple of American tour groups and a handful of stragglers like us. Ragusa itself is a museum — a labrynth — and we spent a couple hours just walking the streets and discovering what’s here. 

Partly to our disappointment and partly to our relief (because Gary has a sore foot), it began to sprinkle while we were out, so we headed back to our apartment, arriving just in time for the start of an all-day rain. The forecast is for this weather to continue the rest of the evening and into tomorrow. So, we are likely apartment-bound for the rest of the weekend. Being "stuck" in Ragusa with this view is just fine with us!