Post 24: A Day Trip to the Baroque Towns of Noto and Modica

    We got to the Municipal parking in the nick of time to avoid a ticket, the cops were checking the car next to ours, and my time slip was way off, like 12 hours off.
   We hit the "regular" road to Noto, or so we thought until Miss Garmin chose to re route us through the Autostrada instead... I am complaining about Miss Garmin with her British accent and terrible pronunciation of Italian names, but I bet the culprit is really some Italian software engineer who either didn't care wether the GPS map was correct, or liked playing practical jokes on unsuspecting GPS trusting tourists and getting them lost in muddy shortcuts or side streets too narrow for a donkey...

   We made it to Noto nonetheless, Famous Noto, World Heritage Site, Patrimoine de l'humanité. The town was basically leveled in the 1796 earthquake, and moved a few miles to a hillside where some famous Architect designed a brand new town from scratch, on a square grid. This basically made it right of the bat a lot less interesting than the older towns rebuilt around their winding original plan, and also it makes for an almost "new" looking town. Eighteenth Century is really pretty new compared to the 2500 years of history accumulated in layers in Syracuse, and 300 year old stone walls don't look all that old. Plus they cheated and used stucco for some of it. Still, it is a very nice place, and the Cathedral is beautiful, atop a huge flight of steps:

 There was a really nice wooden model of the Cathedral after the dome collapsed some years ago:

  It has built rebuilt anew, and the whole structure was so completely restored it looks brand spanking new. 

   In one of the side chapels were two sets of relics in wooden frames that I absolutely loved, and will most likely become inspiration for some more "reliquary boxes" like those I did with icons after our trip to the Greek Islands:

   We walked around the main streets, but I didn't find the "Magic" I was expecting there, so we headed for the next Baroque town 30 kilometers away, Modica, on roads lined with dry stone walls obviously built over many years picking up the stones the plows pulled out of the ground..

   On the way, we had our usual picnic of mortadella, prosciutto, gorgonzola and yogurt , sitting on a wall above a wonderfully green countryside full of olive and pistachio groves, with a small brook singing nearby with the birds: 

   Modica is really made of two twin towns: Modida Alta, and Modica Bassa, each with its very own Baroque Cathedral:

   The rest of the towns had some nice churches and building, and interesting Architectural detail I photographed, but kind of lost in the modern mess of cheap buildings and cars characteristic of most Sicilian towns.