The taxi driver had been told Milwaukee. That’s how tired we were by the time we landed in Catania – tired enough that the instructions we’d given ourselves had apparently not filtered through to the instructions we’d given everyone else. An overnight flight from Detroit to JFK, a night at the TWA Hotel because neither of us was functional enough to manage a connection on no sleep, then the transatlantic leg to Rome, then the short hop south. By the time the car turned inland toward Ragusa, the landscape outside the window had the slightly unreal quality that comes with accumulated exhaustion: pale stone, dry hills, the occasional agave along the roadside.
We got there anyway.
What You See Before You Understand Where You Are
The first thing that registers about Ragusa – before you’ve oriented yourself, before you’ve found the apartment or the nearest bar – is that it is two towns in conversation with each other across a valley. Ragusa Superiore sits on the higher ridge, the newer part, its streets running in something approaching a grid. Below, across a drop that stops you at the edge of it, is Ragusa Ibla: the old town, dense and pale, its domes and bell towers rising in a cluster as if the whole of it had been set down carefully in the bowl of the valley and left to accumulate over centuries. Standing at the edge of Superiore and looking down into Ibla feels less like consulting a map than looking at a fact. The distance between the two isn’t walkable in the abstract sense – it takes will, and stairs, and the understanding that you are descending into something older.
The cliffs beyond the north end of town announce themselves quietly. You follow via Roma out past the buildings and suddenly there’s no more town, just the edge of the ridge and the open air. It clarifies something about the place: Ragusa is built where it is because the terrain insisted on it. The rock wasn’t incidental. The stairs connecting upper and lower town are worn smooth not by tourism but by centuries of people who simply needed to move between two parts of the same city.
We had arrived on a Wednesday evening. The temperature had dropped from whatever it had been during the day, and a breeze was moving through the streets. People were on the stairs – not moving particularly, just present, sitting, talking. The city was doing what Mediterranean cities do on warm evenings, which is to say it was simply out.
We walked without destination, which seemed correct.
Learning to Stop at the Right Times
The cappuccino situation became apparent within the first morning. Not as a discovery exactly, more as a recalibration. In Sicily a cappuccino costs somewhere around a euro fifty, sometimes less, and it is consumed standing at a bar that will be full by eight in the morning and clearing out by nine. There is no lingering implied by the format. You arrive, you drink, the coffee is very good, you leave. This cycle turned out to be one of the more reliable structures of the day.
Coffee with ginseng appeared on the fifth morning as a variation. Sweeter than expected. Worth trying once, though the regular cappuccino reasserted itself as the default quickly enough.
What ten days of this teaches you is less about coffee than about pace. The rhythm of southeast Sicily runs on intervals that are not optional. The restaurants close at three and reopen at seven or eight. Between those hours, the centro quiets. Shops pull their shutters. If you haven’t accounted for this and you’re standing in the heat of early afternoon looking for lunch, you have miscalculated. Once you’ve accepted the structure, you stop fighting the gaps and start using them: a walk in the early morning before the heat, a coffee, some reading, the long afternoon as forced rest, then the evening, which in Ragusa goes late and is worth staying up for.
Comiso, a town nearby, we visited and found quiet in the middle of the afternoon. Whether this was Comiso specifically or simply two o’clock in August was hard to determine. We left without resolving the question.
The stop signs in Sicily are, as far as I could tell, advisory.
Friday Night, Wednesday Night, All the Same
Villa Margherita park at the end of the shopping district is where Ragusa concentrates itself in the evenings. We had assumed, both times we went, that we were catching it on a particularly busy night – Friday, probably, or a weekend. We were wrong once. It was Wednesday. The place was packed on a Wednesday with the easy density of people who have nowhere else to be and no particular reason to hurry home, which seemed less like an event and more like the ordinary texture of the place.
The alleys of Ibla deserve separate attention. They are narrow in the way that predates any concept of vehicle access, and they lead into each other at angles that make direction difficult to maintain. A house we passed had its front door accessible only through a passage barely wide enough for one person. The door was painted a particular shade of blue. A cadillac from the seventies would not have negotiated the neighborhood, which may be why none have tried. The Cathedral of San Giorgio sits at the top of a flight of steps and the piazza in front of it, on a warm evening, is the kind of place that would be very easy to stay in for longer than you planned. The facade is baroque in the way that reads less as ornamentation and more as the building simply insisting on itself.
Gelato appeared as a natural consequence of the heat. Sorbet as a variation. There were several places near the cathedral. These things do not need more analysis than that.
The Question of Actually Living Here
By the fifth day the conversation had turned, as it does in places that make a particular impression, toward the hypothetical: what would daily life here actually look like. Morning walk in the cool before the heat. Coffee. Some food shopping – bread, something from the market. The afternoon somehow. Tennis, if a club could be found (there appears to be one, not within walking distance, but close enough that the concept is viable). Reading. Friends, once you’d made some.
The people we met were, with one exception at a post office, genuinely helpful in a way that went slightly beyond what courtesy requires. A local who had taken us around early on was the kind of person whose existence in a place makes that place feel more navigable – the ones who answer questions you haven’t thought to ask yet. A contact made through a chance introduction left enough of an impression that one of us described it afterward as life-changing, which might be an overstatement but might not be, depending on what was said.
What the place does not feel like is a place that is performing itself for visitors. The tourists are present, particularly in August, but the infrastructure of daily life – the bars, the food shopping, the evening passeggiata – runs alongside the tourist activity rather than being replaced by it. The restaurants in the centro are not cheap by Sicilian standards, though by any other standard they remain remarkably reasonable. A meal that would cost serious money elsewhere costs a fraction of that here, and the food is not making concessions.
Whether it would feel the same in December is the question neither of us could fully answer. We’d visited before in winter and found things quieter, some places closed, the city in a different register. A mainstay bar had been open then, which suggested some continuity. But August Ragusa – alive at midnight, loud around the cathedral steps, the park busy on a Wednesday as if the week had no particular shape – that version of the place requires the heat and the season to be what it is.
We left from Catania airport on a Tuesday morning, having arrived too early for our flight and spending the surplus time lying in the grass outside the terminal. This seemed in keeping with how the trip had gone: slightly improvised, occasionally misdirected, better for it. The overnight flights and the accumulated tiredness of the first two days had given way to something more settled, a routine we’d borrowed from the place rather than brought with us.
The cappuccinos at the airport were fine. Not the same.
