Central Sicily

With so many unique and unforgettable destinations packed into Sicily most holiday makers can be forgiven for overlooking the interiors. Nevertheless the heart of Sicily has much to offer. Visitors can first realize what this Sicily “without sea” is by driving on the highway linking Palermo to Catania. The usually harsh and lively colors of the landscape fade into ages-old silence and ancient immobility. This is the reign of the large latifundium, which has marked the landscape rolling into the distance. Here and there, there are remote farmhouses and infinite mountain trails (the so called trazzere), sometimes winding, sometimes straight as rural highways. The arid area was the ideal background of the movement for the seizure of abandoned farmlands in the post-war period, highlighting the submissive desperation of the farmers with its desolate beauty. It was a glimmer of social awareness against the landed nobility, which still maintained its privileges despite a number of political upheavals.

However, the metaphor of the island as the huge granary of the Roman Empire was closely related with this area and its crop suitability. Even the myth of Demeter and Persephone was drawn from this area’s abundance of harvests. On the shores of the lake Pergusa Persephone–Kore was abducted by Hades, and in the same place her mother Demeter celebrated the rituals of death and revival of nature causing the earth to bring forth bright spring flowers and abundant grain. This area is particularly rich in traces and ruins of ancient temples dedicated to the goddess of corn and the harvest and her daughter Persephone, personification of the spring.

Enna is also called Umbilicus siciliane (Sicilian navel) and the keystone of three different landscapes. The territory to the south-west of the town, going along the valley of the Salso River, crossing Caltanissetta and Mazzarino down to the interiors of the province of Agrigento and the southernmost coasts, is marked by bare and yellowish hills, which are tinged with green by grain in the spring. The desolate mountains in this area still bear the scars of abandoned sulfur mines dug deep into the rock and partly covered by thick woods.

Going to south east, following the SS117 bis over the lake Pergusa, the zones of extensive cultivation of cereals ceded to afforestation areas. In the surroundings of Piazza Armerina the landscape resembles the typical one of the Apennine Mountains.
This territory boasts ruins of ancient roman and Greek art: the ruins of Morgantina and the Villa Romana del Casale. The territory to the north over the valley of the river Dittaino (flowing from west to east) is marked by a large number of towns and villages, some founded in Greek or Roman period and still maintaining a medieval layout, others founded in the XVI-XVII centuries, also known as hanging towns for their splendid position.
They cling to the flanks of the Nebrodi Mountains and overlook the plain of Catania. The constant landmark is the imposing snow-crowned Mount Etna. Those places are referred to as “Lombard places” by Vittorini in the novel “Conversations in Sicily”. There - as far as it is possible to hear speaking the Sicilian dialect - people speak a Gallo-Italic idiom, trace of ancient Lombard settlements in the Norman period.

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