Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History

It is Gagliardi’s S. Giorgio that is the ultimate showstopper—for many of us the most beautiful baroque church in Sicily, in one of the loveliest and most remote corners of the island.

Phoenicians and Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, Spaniards and French, all have left their mark on her.

Finally, the cathedral of Syracuse, one of the only cathedrals to have been built five centuries before the birth of Christ.

And so the legend of the Barbary Coast was born.

Those ancient columns, however, survived all their tribulations, and still stand to prove once again that most curious of historical-religious phenomena: that once a place is recognized as holy, then, regardless of all changes in the prevailing faith, holy it remains.

Magna Graecia, as it was called, was never a nation or an empire in the sense that Rome was to be. Politically, it was simply composed of a number of small city-states; by 500 B.C. there were some 1,500 of them, extending from the Black Sea to the coast of Catalonia.

It lacks the gemlike perfection of the Palatine Chapel, the Byzantine mystery of the Martorana, or the sheer magic that streams down from the great Pantocrator at Cefalù.

He was not an architect but a worker in stucco, and his name was Giacomo Serpotta.

Built in the first quarter of the fourth century, few of its walls remain; what takes the breath away is the quality and quantity of the superb floor mosaics, which cover some 3,500 square meters.

Three piazzas were built along the main street, each with a church on the higher side. The result is the most beautiful city in Sicily, made lovelier still by its glorious honey-colored stone, which seems to absorb and then radiate the almost constant sunshine. The cathedral is probably the most spectacular of the ecclesiastical buildings, thanks largely to the tremendous flight of steps which leads up to it; it is one of the latest of the great buildings of the city, having been completed only in 1770.