h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S a l va t o re S a n t u c c i o S a l v a t o r e S a n t u c c i o w a s b o r n i n 1 9 5 9 . H e g r a d u a t e d i n a r- c h i t e c t u r e w i t h h o n o u r i n 1 9 8 2 . H e h a d P H D a t U n i v e r s i t y o f G e n o v a i n 1 9 9 5 . H e i s A s - s o c i a t e d P r o f e s s o r i n D r a w i n g i n t h e S c h o o l S A A D o f U n i c a m . H e ’s a l s o v i s i t i n g P r o f e s s o r f o r I n s t i t u t U n i v e r s i t a i r e d e l a C ô t e a t D o u a l a i n C a m e r o o n , a n d f o r U n i v e r s i t y o f M i a m i , S o A . H e w r o t e s e v e r a l b o o k s a n d e s s a y s a b o u t a r c h i t e c t u r a l r e p r e s e n t a t i o n . Image Author 1 (300dpi, 3cmx3cm) The overlapped skyline of the Baroque cities in the Val di Noto. The urban landscape of the Val di Noto has an ex- traordinary charm, not only for the architectural features of the Baroque, which are present in the historic centers, but also and above all, for the in- credible relationship with the complex and steep morphology, made up of narrow valleys and slo- pes strongly accentuated. This generates strongly “vertical” urban landscapes, with overlaps sy- stems of very interesting prospects. This article aims to show how the global representation of this urban typology is different and interesting, through the drawing of its landscapes, with the stratification of its buildings and the extraordinary presence of stairs as road links and with the rela- tionship between buildings that orients the town views in vertical direction. The work of represen- tation of these historical centers, presented here, is the result of three years of on-site workshops, held with a group of American students, precisely on the theme of the drawing of Sicilian baroque. Keywords: Skyline; Val di Noto; Urban landscape; Drawing; Baroque. The main innovation was in the changing of the traditional system of representation of the hori- zontal urban view, with a descriptive organization that presented, through vertical fragments, the system of overlapping spaces. This system had as its main cultural references the travels in the Middle East and the graphic description of medi- nas developed in height, very frequent in the Ma- ghreb, starting from the Tunisreise of Klee, Macke and Moilliet, to the drawings of Matisse for Tan- gier; or to the vertical views of Renoir of Algiers. 24.2D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S A N T U C C I O h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t T h e o v e r l a p p e d s k y l i n e o f t h e B a r o q u e c i t i e s i n t h e Va l d i N o t o . INTRODUCTION Some celebrated cities have privileged places from which they can be drawn. An iconic drawing of the city can be made from these places with just a few lines as a sort of ‘summary’: the represen- tative landscape. Drawing Rome from the Orange Garden or Venice from the Punta della Dogana means fixing an archetypical idea of the landscape of these cities: Rome with its soft morphology and cupolas, Venice with the lagoon and, in soft light, the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore. The same is true of drawings of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, with the level of the mosques in the fore- ground, or Manhattan as drawn from Ellis Island with the skyline of skyscrapers. These are com- plex cities, with articulated morphology that can be summarized in a drawing, a representative lan- dscape that crystallizes a recognizable image that is somehow complete. There are thousands of other examples of this type of representation for vastly different cities, but one particular aspect of these images is that they are often horizontal. The urban landscape is told above all through its un- folding over the city terrain and through the sepa- ration of its roofs from the sky. The urban skyline is one of the most common drawings in travellers’ sketchbooks. But this is not always the case. Some cities have morphological characteristics that prevent a mea- ningful representation of their qualities from being depicted in a horizontal drawing. These are cities with steep morphologies and vertical layouts, with road networks supported by hills. Castle towns on steep slopes have a specific characteristic that re- quires a different type of representation. This is the case of many Arab medinas in the Maghreb. In Paul Klee, August Macke, and Lou- is Moillet’s1 celebrated trip to Tunisia between 6 and 19 April 1914, the three artists produced a substantial series of watercolours2 in which, save some rare exceptions, the cities are represented through a superposition of coloured rectangular elements that describe the stratification of the houses. The urban structure is described through a significant sample that evokes the general lay- out of the urban morphology, isolating a fragment of it. This is especially true of Klee’s and Macke’s drawings, made from Kairouan onwards3 up to the celebrated paintings of Hammamet, which both artists represented with vertical framings that al- lude to a picturesque composition akin to abstract art. Before then, the same need to represent a city via a meaningful vertical segment caught Pierre- Auguste Renoir on his stay in Algiers between Fe- bruary 1881 and May 18824. Algiers is described through its staircases, and the Casbah depicted in his The Mosque of 1881 offers a partial view of white columns piled up in the sun. A likewise important experience preceding the one in Tunisia is the paintings made by Henri Matisse in Tangier between 1912 and 19135. In this case, the expedient of the city as seen through windows or doors6 programmatically defines the descrip- tion of Tangiers through a selected slice that is somehow representative of the whole, exemplary. This, then, is the frame of reference in which the research on representing the urban landscape in Val di Noto takes shape. It was carried out with students in the School of Architecture at the Uni- versity of Miami between 2015 and 2018 in three spring workshops about urban morphology and Fig. 1 - Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, 2018. how to represent it sketching. Here we provide some personal results. GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY IN VAL DI NOTO. The Val di Noto can be defined as a territory with some morphological and cultural constants that make it, in a certain sense, a uniform portion of geography. Two elements are especially impor- tant: geography and history. Geography in the sense that this area encompas- ses a series of small towns located on the slopes of the Hyblaean Mountains with a steep morpho- logy, castles, and the presence of considerable differences between the heights of the road le- vels that overlap each other. History, because the entire area stretching from Caltagirone to Scicli, passing through Vizzini, Palazzolo Acreide, Noto, Ragusa Ibla, Modica, etc., is characterized by the baroque reconstruction, albeit with different man- ners and articulated solutions7, following the ter- rible earthquake of 16938. In the evident diversity among the different towns in the Val di Noto lies a common thread that unites them and makes this micro-region a unique exam- ple. Such is the case that this aspect of uniformi- ty is well expressed in the declaration with which 24.3D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S A N T U C C I O h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t T h e o v e r l a p p e d s k y l i n e o f t h e B a r o q u e c i t i e s i n t h e Va l d i N o t o . eight towns in this zone9 were declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites in 2002, under the title ‘Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto (South-Eastern Sicily)’. The third reason explicitly states, ‘3: The exceptional quality of the late baroque art and ar- chitecture in the Val di Noto lies in its geographical and chronological homogeneity, and is the result of the 1693 earthquake in this region’10. VAL DI NOTO IN LITERATURE AND IN MOVIES. The cinematic image of Camilleri produced by di- rector Alberto Sironi for episodes of Commissario Montalbano (in original texts set in the area sur- rounding Porto Empedocle), is not by chance set in a unique urban setting filmed in Scicli, Ragusa Ibla, Comiso, Ispica, Brucoli, and other places in the Val di Noto, acting as if these were all different places within a single city. But what, in reality, are the features of this morphological and stylistic uniqueness? To define them, it is interesting to begin first with some literary and cinematographic descriptions and then reach the specifics of how to communi- cate the urban structure of these cities with dra- wings. In 2009, when the Imperia Public Works Offices were moved, an original text by Salvatore Qua- simodo was discovered. Born in Modica in 1901, he had worked for some time at the offices and had dedicated the composition to his city. “Sentie- ri velati da un tratto di eterno:_ basole fra scorci di storica passione;_ a passi tardi rinvengo in cor mio_ nascituro sguardo che soave m’attrista”11. Paths, steps, glimpses, a poetic vision of a compli- cated city relived in memory. Even crisper and clearer is the description that Gesualdo Bufalino makes of the same Modica in his Argo il cieco: “Fui felice e giovane un’estate, nel cinquantuno. Né prima né dopo. Quell’estate. E forse fu grazie a quel luogo dove abitavo, un pae- se in figura di melagrana spaccata; vicino al mare ma campagnolo; metà ristretto su uno sprone di roccia, metà sparpagliato ai suoi piedi; con tante scale fra le due metà, a far da pacieri, e nuvole in cielo da un campanile all’altro, trafelate come staffette dei Cavalleggeri del Re”12. A broken po- megranate: perhaps the best description of this type of urban landscape, an efficient, complete metaphor. Modica is a broken pomegranate. And then the steps, the main communication route of these landscapes lies in the stairs, in going up and down the steep streets that overlap one another. The stairs always crop up in these descriptions, along with their bell towers, the thousand chur- ches that the baroque period delivered to Modica, as with Noto, Scicli, and Ragusa Ibla. Two lyrical visions of Scicli exist, one by Vittorini and the other by Pasolini. The first is described in Le città del mondo: “Uno degli anni in cui noi uomini di oggi si era ragazzi o bambini, sul tardi d’un pomeriggio di marzo, vi fu in Sicilia un pastore che entrò col figlio e una cinquantina di pecore, più un cane e un asino, nel territorio della città di Scicli. Questa sorge all’in- crocio di tre vallini, con case da ogni parte su per i dirupi, una grande piazza in basso a cavallo del letto d’una fiumara, e antichi fabbricati eccle- siastici che coronano in più punti, come acropoli barocche, il semicerchio delle altitudini. È nell’e- stremità sud-orientale dell’isola; e chi vi arriva dall’interno se la trova d’un tratto ai piedi, festosa di tetti ammucchiati, di gazze ladre e di scampanii; mentre chi vi arriva venendo dal non lontano lito- rale la scorge che si annida con diecimila finestre nere in seno a tutta l’altezza della montagna, tra fili serpeggianti di fumo e qua e là il bagliore d’un vetro aperto o chiuso, di colpo, contro il sole”13. The baroque acropolises are striking, those sort of flying churches that hug the basin, another po- Fig. 2 - Modica from staircase of San Pietro, 2015. Fig. 3 - Ragusa from Ragusa Ibla, 2018. 24.4D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S A N T U C C I O h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t T h e o v e r l a p p e d s k y l i n e o f t h e B a r o q u e c i t i e s i n t h e Va l d i N o t o . megranate on which Scicli sits. The play of roofs, magpies, and bells render in a literary way a joy that is innate even in the drawings of the landsca- pe of this small city; it comes by itself. Pasolini echoes Vittorini, being called in 1959 by Giancarlo Pajetta together with Guttuso, Tromba- dori, Carlo Levi, and other intellectuals to raise public awareness about the degraded living con- ditions in the Chiafura zone, conditions similar to those in Sassi di Matera. Pasolini writes: “Da questa valletta si diramano, tutte dalla stessa parte, altre tre piccole valli, dal- le pareti quasi a picco, bianche di pietra: da lonta- no non si nota nulla; ma salendo per sentieri che sono letticciuli di torrenti, sopra le ultime casu- pole di pietre della cittadina, si sale una specie di montagna del purgatorio, coi gironi uno sull’altro, forati dai buchi delle porte delle caverne sarace- ne, dove la gente ha messo un letto, delle immagi- ni sacre o dei cartelloni di film alle pareti di sassi, e vive, ammassata, qualche volta col mulo. In cima alla valle centrale, Chiafura, c’è un castellaccio diroccato, e una vecchia chiesa, giallo - rosa, ba- rocca, gesuita, distrutta da un terremoto e piena d’erba. Da lassù in alto potei vedere tutta Scicli. Come un vecchio giocattolo, sul calcare, la città di uno scolorito ex voto”14. ‘A mountain of purgatory’, writes Pasolini, ‘with circles on top one another’: again this overlapping of streets and levels. Scicli is for him an old toy on the limestone, ‘a disco- loured ex-voto’: the yellow of the rock has washed away, the toy is old. Concluding this brief summary of literary cita- tions is an even older classic one related to Ispica, which Luigi Capuana baptises Marzallo in the no- vel Profumo. This seems to be the literary tran- scription of the drawings produced in the Val di Noto. It seems that these graphics are dictated precisely by the perception of space that this text suggests. “Anche Eugenia accostò la faccia allo sportello per guardare. In alto, in cima alla roccia che scendeva a picco, si scorgevano, illuminati dal sole, i campanili, le cupole delle chiese, le facciate bianche e i tetti scuri di un gruppo di case affac- ciate proprio all’orlo del precipizio e quasi minac- cianti di buttarsi giù; e lucide macchie verdi alberi Figg. 4-5, Two images of Divorce Italian Style shooted at Ispica. e cespugli, bagnati dalla pioggia, arrampicati tra le sporgenze dei massi drizzantisi minacciosa- mente su la pianura. Non si capiva in che modo la carrozza avrebbe potuto salire lassù, tanto roccia, campanili, cupole e case sembravano vicini, da potersi toccare col dito”15. An impervious, tiring, muscular landscape for those travelling its streets, but at the same time a cultural landscape, a bearer of discreet glances from above, of distances travelled, of soft discre- tion. This is the landscape in which Fefè, Baron Cefalù (Marcello Mastroianni), composes his sentimental story with Angela (Stefania Sandrelli) through in- tense glances and secrets, consummated among the steps, churches, and landscapes of Ispica, in the marvellous and delightful Divorce Italian Style by Pietro Germi (1961). In this film, the small town close to Ragusa becomes Agramonte16 and is re- counted as a landscape in which gazes from abo- ve are always present and partially hidden by the 24.5D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S A N T U C C I O h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t T h e o v e r l a p p e d s k y l i n e o f t h e B a r o q u e c i t i e s i n t h e Va l d i N o t o . Figg. 6-7, Two sketches of Ragusa from the Church of Anime Sante del Purgatorio, 2016. blinds, where the height difference of the roads, buildings, and windows, is instrumental in buil- ding intrigue and passion. Another two films enter in this description of the urban landscape of the small towns in the Val di Noto with great perceptual effectiveness. The first is Kaos, by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, from 1984. The episode ‘Requiem’17 in the first film was lar- gely shot in the main square of Ragusa Ibla. The inclination of the square and the giant bulk of the cathedral that, with its stairs, weighs on the city form a backdrop to a group of country people clai- ming the possibility of burying their loved ones. The steep urban morphology seems perfect for describing the sense of difficulty in reaching the protest’s objective. The second film is The Star Maker by Giuseppe Tornatore (1995). In this film, the set moves between Ragusa Ibla and Monteros- so Almo on the one hand and Matera on the other, masterfully demonstrating how these distant pla- ces are united precisely by their urban geographi- cal conformation, making it possible for these two situations to represent the same place in filmic fiction. Pasolini’s feeling about the caves of Chia- fura returns and is made into an image. HOW WE CAN DRAW THE VAL DI NOTO? How, then, can these feelings described in cine- ma be drawn? How can the pomegranate city be drawn? How can the idea of these overlapping ver- tical cities be rendered with a drawing? The task goes beyond the simple technique of re- presentation, if it is true as Küster says, that “Sin dalla loro origine i quadri e le fotografie costitui- scono la testimonianza storica di un paesaggio re- almente esistente o astratto oppure di un ideale, una metafora che l’artista o il fotografo vi hanno scorto, forse addirittura un simbolo. Se un pae- saggio concreto è immortalato sul carta fotografi- ca o su una tela gli uomini possono adoperarsi per conservarne l’immagine. Essa entra a far parte della loro cultura, benché il paesaggio, in quanto parte della natura, continui ad evolversi dopo l’i- stante della contemplazione”18. The towns in the Val di Noto have almost always 24.6D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S A N T U C C I O h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t T h e o v e r l a p p e d s k y l i n e o f t h e B a r o q u e c i t i e s i n t h e Va l d i N o t o . been depicted vertically over the course of our workshops. The idea was to isolate an important section of the urban fabric, even free of emergen- cies, presenting the observer with the possibility of imagining the development of the town to the right and left of the sheet, and at the same time describing its superposition, the structure of the houses, one literally on top of the other, the rhe- toric of the streets that inevitably become stairs. The stairs are prominent in the drawings of Noto, Modica, and Ibla. At times they have a monumental dimension, rea- ching the platform on which the churches rest: the Noto Cathedral, or the Cathedral of San Giorgio in Ragusa Ibla or the Church of San Pietro in Modica. At times they are fundamental connection arte- ries in the distribution of urban flows, such as in the case of the imposing stairs of Santa Maria del Monte in Caltagirone or the steep ascent of Santa Maria delle Scale that connects Ragusa to Ragusa Ibla like a very direct pedestrian line. Or the stairs are simple alleys. Contorted and steep, with unex- Fig, 8, Scicli, San Domenico, 2016. pected and mysterious perspectives, they form part of the roadway network that communicates with the flat alleys which they often branch off from to lead to other roads or homes, to private places. The stairs mark the illustrations of the towns in the Val di Noto; they intensify the stroke. They illustrate their insinuation within a very den- se rocky building network, but above all, they re- count the emotion of a progression upwards that holds contemplative value. As Milani says, “varchiamo la soglia dell’osserva- re per inoltrarci in un guardare che apre a un’im- provvisa scoperta. Traduciamo l’atto della visione in un rito del tempo e dello spazio, in una preghie- ra tutta privata, dei sensi e della mente, per con- centrarci sull’immagine che vogliamo custodire, che giudichiamo assolutamente nostra”19. Another prominent ingredient are the churches. Churches that reach to the sky, those baroque acropolises Vittorini speaks about that naturally end in the upper part of the drawing, those ico- nographic, archetypal representations mentioned Fig, 9, Monumental staircases of Churches: Cathedral of Noto, Ragusa Ibla and Modica, 2015. 24.7D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S A N T U C C I O h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t T h e o v e r l a p p e d s k y l i n e o f t h e B a r o q u e c i t i e s i n t h e Va l d i N o t o . at the beginning of this brief essay, or an urban panorama that can only be described in sections, typified and partial. The churches place God on high and man below; they place the latter in a sta- te of struggling and limping along the climb to di- vine glory. At the same time, however, from above they provide the opportunity to observe the life of the town and, as Germi says, to control the tension and intrigue. For this, perhaps, it is not even necessary to draw them entirely. It is enough to make an isolated shortcut, offer this partial urban representation, a small trace that underlines its presence, a discre- te notation, a hushed marginal note. CONCLUSION. The horizontal skyline of Rome from the Orange Garden or New York from Ellis Island, as men- tioned at the beginning, has no sense here. It is necessary to change the direction of the view, to rise up, and for the width, only to hint, promise, stimulate thought. Fig, 10, Urban staircase in Caltagirone, 2015. Fig, 11, Stairs like simple alleys in Ibla, 2016.. Here the morphological sign is not external, but entirely internal; the form of the city is within it- self, concealed by a tangle of stairs, houses, and churches that, on their overlapping levels, con- strain the drawing to claustrophobic, congested images where, however, it seems to feel a shout in dialect from far away, a bell that sounds. It is the portrait of the pomegranate. 24.8D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S A N T U C C I O h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t T h e o v e r l a p p e d s k y l i n e o f t h e B a r o q u e c i t i e s i n t h e Va l d i N o t o . NOTE [1] Kleis, S.M. (2010). Tunisreise von Klee und Macke “Die Farbe hat mich”, in Spiegel on line, Donner- stag 02.12. [2] IDuring the twelve days of his stay in Tunisia, Paul Klee made 35 watercolours and 13 drawings while August Macke made 33 watercolours and 79 drawings in three sketchbooks. [3] The three artists’ trip made an important turn in Keiruan. Macke, Mailliet, and Klee painted the sce- nes they found: nature, people, the sun, and colours. On the evening of the 16th, a new awareness barged into Paul Klee’s spirit. He noted in his journal: ‘A sense of comfort reached deep into me; I felt secure and was not tired. Colour posses- ses me. I do not need to try to grab it. It possesses me always. I feel it. This is the sense of the happy hour: colour and I are one. I am a pain- ter’. (“Un senso di conforto penetra profondo in me, mi sento sicuro, non provo stanchezza. Il colore mi possiede. Non ho bisogno di ten- tare di afferrarlo. Mi possiede per sempre, lo sento. Questo è il senso dell’ora felice: io e il colore siamo tutt’uno. Sono pittore.”) [Klee, P. (1984). Diari 1898-1918, Milan, Il Saggiatore, pag. 301]. [4] Benjamin, R., & Prochaska, D. (2003). Renoir and Algeria, New Haven, Yale University Press. [5] Serafini, G. (2014). Matisse e il Mediterraneo, Florence, Giunti. [6] See Matisse’s paintings: The Casbah Door, 1912; Window at Tan- gier, 1912-1913; Open Window at Tangier, 1913. [7] See Giuffrè M. (2007). Barocco in Sicilia, Verona, Arsenale; Nobile M. R., & Piazza S. (2009). Architet- tura del Settecento in Sicilia, Storie e protagonisti del tardo Barocco, Palermo, Edizioni d’arte Kalós; Tri- gilia L. (2007). Un viaggio nella val- le del barocco, Pantalica, Siracusa e le città del val di Noto ‘patrimonio dell’umanità’, Catania, Sanfilippo. [8] The earthquakes on 9 and 11 January 1863 registered a calcula- ted magnitude of 7.3 on the Richter scale. According to historians, it may be the strongest earthquake ever recorded in Italy. See Cosenti- no M. (1993). ‘L’epicentro in mezzo al mare, dossier 300 anni dopo’, in La Sicilia from 9 January. As re- ported by the scholar S. Nicolosi, ‘In Catania, 16,000 people died out of a population of about 20,000; in Modica, 3400 people out of a popu- lation of 18,200; in Ragusa, about 5000 people died out of 9950; in Lentini, 4000 victims out of 10,000 residents; in Occhiolà (formerly Granmichele) that numbered 2910 residents and 52% perished; in Syracuse with about 4000 victims out of 15,339 residents; in Militello with about 3000 victims out of a population of nearly 10,000; in Mi- neo, there were 1355 deaths out of 6723 residents; in the other towns, about 15% to 35% of the resident population died, more than 1000 victims in Caltagirone, even this largely razed, out of a population of about 20,000 people, except Palazzolo Acreide and Buscemi, which mourned the death of 41% of inhabitants’ “a Catania moriro- no 16.000 persone su una popo- lazione di circa 20.000; a Modica morirono 3.400 persone su una popolazione di 18.200; a Ragusa morirono circa 5.000 persone su 9.950; a Lentini con 4.000 vittime su 10.000 abitanti; ad Occhiolà (l’antica Granmichele) che conta- va 2.910 abitanti e ne perirono il 52%; a Siracusa con circa 4.000 vittime su 15.339 abitanti; a Mili- tello con circa 3.000 vittime su una popolazione di quasi 10.000; a Mi- neo i morti furono 1.355 su 6.723 abitanti; gli altri centri ebbero dal 15% al 35% di morti rispetto alla popolazione residente, più di 1.000 le vittime a Caltagirone, anch’es- sa in gran parte rasa al suolo, su una popolazione di circa 20.000 persone, tranne Palazzolo Acrei- de e Buscemi che lamentarono la scomparsa del 41% degli abitanti”. (See: Nicolosi, S. (1982). Apocalis- se in Sicilia, Il terremoto del 1693. Catania, Tringale. [9] The eight cities are: Caltagiro- ne, Militello Val di Catania, Catania, Modica, Noto, Palazzolo, Ragusa, and Scicli. [10] The other reasons are: 1: the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto in south-eastern Sicily pro- vide outstanding testimony to the exuberant genius of late Baroque art and architecture; 2: they re- present the culmination and final flowering of Baroque art in Europe; 4: the eight towns are permanen- tly at risk from earthquakes and eruptions of Mount Etna. See Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto (South-Eastern Sicily), at unesco. org. [11] ‘Paths veiled by a stretch of eternity: cobblestones between glimpses of historical passion: with slow steps they are found in my heart, an unborn glance that while sweet, saddens me’. TbA. See: http://archivio.blogsicilia.it/ inedito-di-salvatore-quasimodo- poesia-su-modica. [12] ‘I was happy and young one summer, in 1951. Neither before nor after. That summer. And maybe thanks to that place where I lived, a country in the shape of a broken pomegranate; close to the sea but rural; half confined on a rocky spur, half scattered at its feet; with so many steps between the two hal- ves as peacemakers, and clouds in the sky from one bell tower to the other, out of breath like couriers with the king’s cavalry’. TbA. Bufa- lino G. (2018). Argo il cieco, Floren- ce, Giunti/Bompiani, pag. 6. [13] ‘One of the years when us men of today were teenagers or children, late on a March afterno- on, there was a shepherd in Sicily who, with his son and about fifty sheep, plus a dog and a donkey, entered the territory of Scicli. This rises at the intersection of three small valleys, with houses on every part above the cliffs, a large square below astride the bed of a river, and old ecclesiastical buil- dings that crown various points like baroque acropolises, the semi- circle of the elevations. And in the extreme south-west of the island: whoever arrives from inland finds a segment of it at his feet, festive with its mass of roofs, magpies, and the peal of bells; while anyo- ne who arrives from the nearby coast glimpses it nestled with ten thousand black windows at heart all over the mountain, between serpentine wafts of smoke and here and there the flash of a win- dow being open or closed suddenly against the sun’. TbA. Vittorini E. (1991). Le città del mondo, Milan, Mondadori, pag. 22. [14] ‘From this valley other small valleys branch off, all from the same part, from the walls nearly at the peak, white with stone. From afar you don’t notice anything, but rising on paths that are stream beds, above the last stone huts of the town, rises a sort of mountain of purgatory, with the circles on top of one another, punctured by the holes of the doors of the Saracen caves, where people have put a bed, sacred images, or film posters on the rock walls and live, some- times together with a mule. At the top in the central valley, Chiafura, a castle lies in ruins and there is an old church, yellow-rose, baroque, Jesuit, destroyed by an earthquake and full of weeds. From there up high I could see all of Scicli. Like an old toy on the limestone, the city of a discoloured ex-voto’. TbA. Pa- solini P. P. (1959). La loro coscien- za è già nel domani,  in Vie Nuove, May 30. [15] ‘Eugenia also moved her face close to the window to look. Above, at the top of the rock that descen- ded steeply, the bell towers arose, lit by the sun, with the domes of the churches, the white façades and dark roofs of a group of hou- ses sitting right at the edge of the precipice and almost threatening to throw themselves over; and the bright green stains of trees and bushes bathed by the rain, clim- bing among the outcrops of the rocks rising up threateningly on the plain. One cannot understand how the road could have been able to rise up there, so much rock, the bell towers, domes, and houses seemed so close you could touch them with your finger’. TbA. Ca- puana L. (2008). Profumo, Udine, Morganti Editori, pag. 164. [16] ’… Agramonte, 18,000 resi- dents, 4300 illiterate people, 1700 either permanently and tempo- rarily unemployed, 24 churches, if I recall well, among which are notable baroque examples from the late 1600s ...’ (“...Agramonte, 18.000 abitanti, 4300 analfabeti, 1700 disoccupati tra fissi e flut- tuanti, 24 chiese, se ben ricordo, tra le quali si annoverano alcuni notevoli esemplari barocchi del tardo seicento...”) This is how Marcello Mastroianni describes the town where he returns at the beginning of the film. [17] The film Kaos is inspired by four stories in Novelle per un anno by Luigi Pirandello and is compo- sed of four episodes (‘L’altro figlio’, ‘Mal di Luna’, ‘La giara’, ‘Requiem’) and an epilogue. Tying the episo- des together is the flight of a black crow with a small bell around its neck. [18} ‘From the beginning, paintings and photographs constitute the hi- storical record of a landscape that really exists, or an abstract one, or even an ideal one, a metaphor that the artist or photographer has glimpsed, perhaps even a symbol. If a concrete landscape is immor- talized on the photographic paper or a canvas, people can work to preserve its image. It becomes part of their culture, while the landsca- pe, as a part of nature, continues to evolve after the moment of con- templation’. TbA. Küster, H. (2010). Piccola storia del paesaggio, Rome, Donzelli, pag. 9. [19] ‘we cross the threshold of observation to advance to a look that opens onto an unexpected discovery. We translate the act of viewing into a rite of time and space, in an entirely private pra- yer of the senses and the mind, to concentrate on the image that we want to protect, that we judge to be entirely our own’. TbA. Milani, R. (2005). Il paesaggio è un’avventu- ra, Milan, Feltrinelli, pag. 41. 24.9D R AW I N G T H E T E R R I T O RY A N D T H E L A N D S C A P Ev o l u m e 1 2 / n . 2 2 - j u n e 2 0 1 9 I S S N 1 8 2 8 - 5 9 6 1 DISEGNARECON S A N T U C C I O h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t T h e o v e r l a p p e d s k y l i n e o f t h e B a r o q u e c i t i e s i n t h e Va l d i N o t o . REFERENCES Giuffrè M. (2007). Barocco in Sici- lia, Verona, Arsenale. Küster, H. (2010). Piccola storia del paesaggio, Roma, Donzelli. Milani, R. (2005). Il paesaggio è un’avventura, Milano, Feltrinelli. Nicolosi, S. (1982). Apocalisse in Sicilia, Il terremoto del 1693. Cata- nia, Tringale. Nobile M. R., & Piazza S. (2009). Architettura del Settecento in Sici- lia, Storie e protagonisti del tardo Barocco, Palermo, Edizioni d’arte Kalós. Pasolini P. P. (1959). La loro co- scienza è già nel domani, in Vie Nuove, may 30th. Trigilia L. (2007). Un viaggio nella valle del barocco, Pantalica, Sira- cusa e le città del val di Noto «pa- trimonio dell’umanità», Catania, Sanfilippo. Vittorini E. (1991). Le città del mon- do, Milano, Mondadori.