The history of Scicli

The city rises at the meeting point of the quarries of Santa Venera and San Bartolomeo. It dominates the coastal area, encompassing the mouth of the Irminio River.
The oldest settlement is district Chiafura, which extends over San Matteo Hill. It is a settlement carved out of the rock that transformed the burials and tombs, built in earlier times, into dwellings.
A place compared to the Sassi of Matera, it has been visited by writers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini ((“one climbs a kind of purgatory mountain with the circles one on top of the other..”) and Elio Vittorini, who described the living conditions of its inhabitants.
Chiafura has now become an archaeological park.
Between the 14th and 15th centuries, the settlement began to expand towards the valley, together with the sites of some religious orders.
The new town was dominated by St. Matthew, the former mother church, together with the Castle of the Three Cantons and the convent complex of Saint Mary of the Cross of the Reformed Friars Minor, located on the upper part of the quarry.
During the devastating earthquake of 1693, the town was razed to the ground and rebuilt on the same site.
In the mid-1800s, St. Ignatius’ was erected as the mother church in the centre of the town, with the hillside site being abandoned permanently.
Very little remains of the pre-earthquake buildings, except part of the monumental complex of St. Mary of the Cross, built in 16th century near the Oratory of Our Lady of Sion, which was converted into a sacristy, and the complex of St. Antonino, attributed to the end of the 15th and 16th centuries.
The city was extensively renovated after the earthquake, including some of the street layouts, as evidenced by the Via Mormino Penna, where some of the most beautiful monuments from the late Baroque period in Hyblea are located.
Since 2002, two of its monuments have been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List: the Via Mormino Penna and the Palazzo Beneventano (4). The following are also of late-Baroque value and relevance: Church of St. John the Evangelist (1); Church of St. Michael the Archangel (2); Church of St. Teresa (3); Palazzo Beneventano (4); Palazzo Spadaro (5); Palazzo Veneziano Sgarlata (6); Palazzo Fava (7); Church and Convent of Carmine (8); Church of St. Matthew (9); Chiesa Madre (Mother Church) (St. Ignatius) (10).