The writer Elio Vittorini described Scicli as “perhaps the most beautiful city in the world.” The description is excessive by any objective measure, but it gestures at something real: Scicli has a quality that its more famous neighbours in the Val di Noto Noto, Ragusa, Modica have partly sacrificed to their own popularity. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that has not yet been discovered by the tourist buses. It is a baroque town with genuine contemporary cultural life, a school of painting of international significance, a cave city abandoned in living memory, an annual festival involving a warrior Virgin on a white horse, and a street that doubles as the commissariato of Sicily’s most famous fictional detective.
Scicli is pronounced Shee-klee. It sits at the junction of three narrow valleys the quarries of Modica, Santa Maria La Nova and San Bartolomeo at the point where the Hyblaean plateau gives way to the coastal plain reaching south to the sea. The town was almost completely destroyed by the earthquake of 1693 and rebuilt in the late baroque style over the following decades, following its original medieval street plan. The result is a small city of extraordinary internal coherence: golden limestone palaces and churches on a human scale, without the grandeur of Noto or the topographic drama of Ragusa, but with an authenticity and a local life that both of those towns have largely lost.
In this guide
- Via Mormino Penna the finest baroque street
- Palazzo Beneventano and the baroque palaces
- The Inspector Montalbano locations
- The hill churches and the view from San Matteo
- Chiafura the cave city
- The festivals Madonna delle Milizie and Easter
- The Scicli Group contemporary art in a baroque town
- What to eat in Scicli and the Testa di Turco
- The beaches near Scicli
- Practical information
- Frequently asked questions
Scicli quick facts
- UNESCO status: Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto (2002)
- Location: Province of Ragusa, southeastern Sicily, 15 km from the coast
- From Ragusa: 35 minutes (30 km)
- From Modica: 20 minutes (15 km)
- From Noto: 55 minutes (55 km)
- How many days: Half a day for the town; 2 nights as a base for the Val di Noto and coast
- Famous for: Inspector Montalbano filming locations, Palazzo Beneventano, the cave city of Chiafura, the Scicli Group of painters, the Testa di Turco pastry
- Pronounce it: Shee-klee
Via Mormino Penna the finest baroque street
Via Francesco Mormino Penna is the heart of Scicli and one of the finest single streets in the Val di Noto. A pedestrian thoroughfare paved in golden basalt, it runs through the historic centre flanked by baroque palaces, noble residences and churches, with the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista closing the perspective at its western end. The building scale is consistent, the stonework is golden in warm light, and the absence of cars makes the street unusual among southern Sicilian historic centres in the genuinely human quality of its proportions.
Unlike Via Vittorio Emanuele in Noto or Corso Umberto in Modica, Via Mormino Penna has not been colonised by souvenir shops and tourist restaurants. The shops are local, the cafes are unpretentious, and on weekday mornings the street belongs almost entirely to its residents going about their daily business. Walking it in the early morning, before the occasional tour group arrives, gives a sense of what all the Val di Noto towns must have felt like before their own popularity transformed them.
At the western end, the piazza opens to reveal the Palazzo del Municipio the town hall which serves as Inspector Montalbano’s commissariato in the television series (more on this below) and the Chiesa di San Giovanni Evangelista, its baroque facade closing the view with admirable theatrical effect. This piazza, with the town hall on one side and the church on the other, is the social and visual centre of Scicli.
Palazzo Beneventano and the baroque palaces
Palazzo Beneventano, on Via Nazionale just off Via Mormino Penna, is the most celebrated piece of secular baroque architecture in Scicli and one of the finest baroque palaces in the Val di Noto. Built in the mid-18th century, it is famous above all for its exterior decoration: the balconies of the piano nobile are supported by carved corbels of extraordinary inventiveness and grotesque power human figures, sphinxes, lions, horses, and fantastical hybrid creatures in contorted poses, each one different from the others, projecting from the facade with the same uninhibited exuberance that characterises the famous balconies of Palazzo Nicolaci in Noto.
The carving at Palazzo Beneventano is arguably more varied and more viscerally expressive than Nicolaci’s the figures have a quality of strain and effort, as if genuinely bearing weight, that gives the facade a physical intensity unusual even within the baroque tradition of the Val di Noto. The building is freely accessible from the street and the facade can be examined at close range from the pavement below.
Other notable baroque palaces in the immediate vicinity include Palazzo Spadaro on Via Mormino Penna (which houses a permanent collection of works by the Scicli Group painters) and Palazzo Bonelli, a more restrained but equally accomplished baroque facade a few steps from the main street. Scicli’s baroque is generally less monumental than Noto’s and less dramatically sited than Ragusa’s it is a baroque of detail and texture rather than grand urban compositions, and it rewards slow, close examination.
The Inspector Montalbano locations
The television series Il Commissario Montalbano, based on the novels of Andrea Camilleri and broadcast internationally since 1999, used Scicli and the surrounding towns of the Val di Noto as its primary filming locations. The fictional town of Vigata Montalbano’s seaside base is a composite of several real locations, but Scicli’s Via Mormino Penna and the Palazzo del Municipio appear as the commissariato, the police station from which Montalbano operates, in dozens of episodes.
The palazzo is the actual functioning town hall of Scicli. Entry to the commissariato set inside the building costs a small fee (approximately €3) and includes a visit to the rooms used for filming, largely preserved in their television form with props, photographs and production materials. It is a slightly surreal experience a genuine piece of civic architecture that has been simultaneously a working municipal building and a television set for more than two decades.
Beyond the commissariato, fans of the series will recognise multiple locations throughout the town and the surrounding coast. The fictional Vigata seafront corresponds to the real town of Punta Secca, approximately 25 kilometres south of Scicli, where Montalbano’s beachfront house is now a B&B that rents rooms and organises tours of the filming locations. The church of Santa Maria La Nova in Scicli’s lower valley and several streets of the historic centre also appear regularly in the series.
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The hill churches and the view from San Matteo
Scicli’s most distinctive feature, the one that sets it apart from all the other Val di Noto towns, is its vertical geography. The baroque town in the valley below is surrounded by a semicircle of rocky hills, and on those hills stand the ruins of the pre-earthquake city: abandoned churches, a castle, and the remnants of the settlement that the Sciclitani left behind after 1693 when they rebuilt their city on the valley floor.
The most prominent of these hilltop monuments is the Chiesa di San Matteo, the former mother church of the city, which was abandoned in 1874 when its congregation moved to a new church in the lower town. The building itself is largely intact on the exterior but open to the sky the roof has gone and the interior is gradually being reclaimed by vegetation. From the terrace in front of San Matteo, the view across Scicli below is one of the finest urban panoramas in the Val di Noto: the baroque town spread across the valley floor, the churches and palaces of Via Mormino Penna directly below, and the surrounding plateau extending to the distant south coast.
The walk from the town centre to San Matteo takes approximately 20 to 30 minutes on a steep path. From San Matteo, a further path leads to the Castello dei Tre Cantoni the remains of a Norman fortification with a unique triangular tower, the symbolic significance of which (possibly related to the three points of Sicily’s own triangular shape) has never been satisfactorily explained by archaeologists. The descent offers different views of the town from varying angles and is recommended over the ascent route for its more varied perspectives.
Chiafura the cave city
On the slopes of San Matteo hill, between the abandoned church above and the baroque town below, the rock face is honeycombed with Chiafura a settlement of cave dwellings carved directly into the limestone cliff, inhabited continuously from the Bronze Age until the mid-20th century. The last residents of Chiafura were rehoused in modern apartments in the 1950s and 1960s; the caves have been empty since then, their doorways and window openings visible from the town below as dark rectangular holes in the pale cliff face.
Chiafura is frequently and accurately compared to Matera in Basilicata the famous sassi, the cave dwellings of the Basilicata city that became a European Capital of Culture in 2019 and one of the most visited destinations in southern Italy. The comparison is apt: both are southern Italian cave cities inhabited into the modern era and then abandoned within living memory. The difference is that Matera receives millions of visitors per year and Chiafura receives almost none. The caves can be explored on foot via paths from the town centre, with no entry fee, no visitor facilities and virtually no other tourists.
Some of the cave rooms have been opened for occasional exhibitions and cultural events by the local administration and local artists, continuing the tradition of using Scicli’s unusual spaces as venues for contemporary art. Visiting Chiafura in the late afternoon, when the light falls on the cliff face from the west and the baroque town below begins to catch its golden hour, is one of the finest experiences in Scicli.
The festivals Madonna delle Milizie and Easter
Scicli’s calendar is anchored by two festivals of exceptional local importance, both of which draw visitors from across Sicily and are worth timing a visit around.
The Madonna delle Milizie, held on the last Saturday of May, commemorates the Battle of Micenci in 1091, in which Norman forces under Roger of Altavilla defeated a Saracen army near Scicli with the supernatural assistance of the Madonna herself, who according to local tradition appeared on a white horse and led the Christian forces to victory. The festival recreates this event with a procession of participants in elaborately detailed period costumes Norman knights, Saracen warriors, clergy and townspeople and culminates in the appearance of the Madonna a Cavallo statue in the main piazza. The statue’s dress and the procession choreography are taken with considerable seriousness and the event draws participants from across the province.
The Easter celebrations in Scicli are among the most atmospheric in the Val di Noto. The culminating event is the procession of the Uomo Vivo (the Living Man) on Easter morning a representation of the resurrected Christ through the streets of the historic centre that has been held in the same form for centuries and was immortalised in song by the singer-songwriter Vinicio Capossela, who composed “Uomo Vivo (Inno alla gioia)” after participating in the procession. The subsequent procession continues to the sea at Donnalucata, 10 kilometres away.
The Scicli Group contemporary art in a baroque town
One of the least expected things about Scicli is that it has been, since the 1960s, a significant centre of contemporary Italian painting. The Gruppo di Scicli (Scicli Group) is a loose association of painters who have worked in the town and been profoundly shaped by its landscape, light and architecture. The most internationally recognised member is Piero Guccione, whose large-format paintings of the Sicilian coast and the Val di Noto landscape have been exhibited in major Italian and international institutions. Other members include Franco Sarnari, Carmelo Candiano, Franco Polizzi and several others whose work engages with the same quality of Sicilian light that has attracted painters to this landscape since the 18th century.
Palazzo Spadaro on Via Mormino Penna has a permanent collection of works by Scicli Group members and is open for visits. Several of the town’s exhibition spaces also host rotating shows of contemporary work. The presence of working artists and their studios gives Scicli an intellectual and cultural dimension that purely architectural baroque towns lack, and contributes significantly to the town’s arty, unhurried atmosphere.
What to eat in Scicli and the Testa di Turco
Scicli has a food culture rooted in the Hyblaean agricultural tradition, with strong Arab-influenced sweets and pastries that reflect the multicultural history of the Val di Noto. The most specific local product is the Testa di Turco the “Turkish Head” a cream puff pastry of turban shape, filled with ricotta cream or custard, whose name commemorates the victory over the Saracens at the Battle of Micenci in 1091. The shape evokes the turbaned head of the defeated Saracen warriors. It is sold at the pastry shops on and around Via Mormino Penna and is one of the genuinely specific food experiences of Scicli, not available in the neighbouring towns.
The vastidduzza is a local street food a small bread roll with a particular shape specific to Scicli, available at the bakeries of the historic centre. The bar and pastry culture of Via Mormino Penna is unpretentious and good value, reflecting the lack of tourist markup that still characterises Scicli’s food scene. For lunch, the trattorias in the streets behind the main piazza serve the Hyblaean kitchen pasta with local pork ragù, grilled meats, seasonal vegetables at prices that feel honest rather than calculated.
The beaches near Scicli
Scicli is approximately 15 kilometres from the sea and gives access to one of the longest and least developed stretches of coastline in southeastern Sicily. The municipality of Scicli administers more than 20 kilometres of coast the largest coastal territory in the province of Ragusa with several distinct beach towns of varying character.
Sampieri, 11 kilometres south, is the finest beach near Scicli: a long arc of pale sand with clear water, low development pressure by Sicilian standards and an excellent summer atmosphere that remains predominantly local rather than touristy. The ruins of the Fornace Penna, a large abandoned brick factory of the early 20th century standing directly on the beach, is one of the most photogenic industrial ruins in Sicily and has featured in several Montalbano episodes.
Donnalucata, 10 kilometres south, is the oldest of Scicli’s seaside villages its name derives from the Arabic “Ayn-Al-Awqat,” meaning “spring of the hours,” a reference to a freshwater spring that once flowed onto the beach at tidal intervals. It has a small working fishing harbour, a local fish market, and a laid-back atmosphere considerably more authentic than many of the more popular beaches further north on the Sicilian coast.
Punta Secca, 25 kilometres east, is the beach where Inspector Montalbano’s house stands now a B&B but identifiable to any fan of the series from the terrace, the sea view and the lighthouse in the background. The beach itself is excellent and the town is small enough to retain a genuine local character.
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Practical information for visiting Scicli
How to get there
By car from Ragusa, follow the SS115 toward Modica and then the SP40 to Scicli (approximately 35 minutes, 30 km). From Modica, approximately 20 minutes (15 km) via the SP40. From Noto, approximately 55 minutes (55 km) via the SS115. A limited train service connects Scicli to Ragusa (approximately 1 hour, €2.20), and AST buses run several times daily from Ragusa (approximately 1 hour, €3.90). A car is strongly recommended for reaching the beaches and for day trips to Ragusa, Modica and Noto.
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Scicli and the Val di Noto are best explored by car. Compare prices across all major rental companies at Catania and Comiso airports and book in advance for the best rates. Always select full coverage (zero excess).
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ZTL and parking
Via Mormino Penna is a 24-hour pedestrian zone do not attempt to drive into it. Park in the public car parks at the edge of the historic centre and explore on foot. The ZTL signs are clearly marked; entering the restricted zone in a rental car will result in a fine.
When to visit
Scicli is excellent year-round. The Easter celebrations and the Madonna delle Milizie festival in May are the most atmospheric times to visit. Spring (April to June) and autumn (September to October) offer comfortable temperatures for walking the hill paths to San Matteo and Chiafura. Summer is warm and pleasant; unlike the more popular Val di Noto towns, Scicli in July and August remains manageable rather than overwhelming. Read our complete best time to visit Sicily guide.
Day trips from Scicli
Scicli’s central position in the Val di Noto makes it an excellent base for the whole baroque cluster. Read our complete guides to Ragusa, Modica, Noto and Syracuse for day trip planning. For the full island, read our Sicily 7-day itinerary and Sicily road trip guide.
Frequently asked questions about Scicli
Is Scicli worth visiting?
Yes, strongly. Scicli offers the Val di Noto baroque experience in its most authentic and least commercialised form. The architecture is outstanding, the cave city of Chiafura is extraordinary, the festivals are genuine expressions of local culture rather than tourist performances, and the absence of large crowds gives the town a quality of daily life that Noto and Ragusa have largely lost. For visitors who have already seen the more famous Val di Noto towns, Scicli is a revelation. For first-time visitors to the area, it makes an excellent base.
How do you pronounce Scicli?
Shee-klee. The “sc” before “i” in Italian is pronounced like the English “sh.”
Is Scicli the Montalbano commissariato?
Yes. The Palazzo del Municipio on Via Mormino Penna in Scicli served as the exterior and interior filming location for Inspector Montalbano’s commissariato throughout the television series. Entry to the set inside the building is available for a small fee.
What is Chiafura?
Chiafura is a settlement of cave dwellings carved into the limestone cliff of San Matteo hill, inhabited from the Bronze Age until the 1950s when the last residents were rehoused in modern apartments. It can be explored freely on foot from the town centre, with no entry fee, and is one of the most atmospheric and least visited archaeological sites in southeastern Sicily.
What is the Testa di Turco?
The Testa di Turco (“Turkish Head”) is a pastry specific to Scicli a turban-shaped cream puff filled with ricotta or custard cream. Its name commemorates the victory over the Saracens at the Battle of Micenci in 1091, which is also celebrated in the Madonna delle Milizie festival each May. It is available at the pastry shops on Via Mormino Penna.
The Val di Noto as it used to be
Scicli is what Noto and Ragusa were fifteen years ago: a baroque UNESCO town with its own life, its own culture and its own daily rhythm, not yet absorbed into the circuit of tour buses and instagram accounts that have transformed its more celebrated neighbours. The cave city on the hill, the warrior Virgin on horseback, the painters working in baroque palaces, the commissariato on Via Mormino Penna these are not tourist attractions that have been packaged for consumption. They are simply what Scicli is.
For the complete Val di Noto picture, read our guides to Ragusa, Modica, Noto and Valley of the Temples. For the full island, read our Sicily 7-day itinerary.
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