Tourism has been my passion and my profession since 1990. I began in La Plata, Argentina, at Euromar Turismo, the agency owned by my beloved father, Orazio Filippo Greco, before continuing in Italy with Andina Viaggi. Merlintravel grows from that experience and the desire to keep exploring and sharing the world. The journey continues…
Let’s see where it takes us.
Tourism has been my passion and my profession since 1990. I began in La Plata, Argentina, at Euromar Turismo, the agency owned by my beloved father, Orazio Filippo Greco, before continuing in Italy with Andina Viaggi. Merlintravel grows from that experience and the desire to keep exploring and sharing the world. The journey continues…
Let’s see where it takes us.
Illustrated guide · Sicily
Twenty places through which to read Caltagirone as a medieval hill city repaired after 1693, a centre of ceramic knowledge and a living urban landscape.
Explore the placesThe staircase is famous because an entire city continues on both sides of it
Ceramics are equally easy to turn into a timeless label. Archaeological objects, imported Greek vessels, medieval pharmacy jars, workshop production, nineteenth-century figures and contemporary sculpture do not form one unchanged craft. They reveal repeated exchanges among local clay, fuel, markets, technical knowledge, taste and labour.
The earthquake of 1693 did not erase Caltagirone and move it to a new grid. The damaged old town was repaired and transformed on its existing hills. Medieval routes survived inside a late-Baroque city; later façades, gardens, museums and ceramic interventions added further layers without making the place uniform.
This guide therefore climbs and descends. It reads the Scala as infrastructure before spectacle, museums as changing homes for collections, churches as active institutions and workshops as places of work. Colour matters here, but so do earth, fire, rebuilding and use.
One destination
Caltagirone occupies a broken system of hills between the plains of Catania and Gela. The older fortified quarter rises around Santa Maria del Monte; lower civic and religious centres extend through Piazza Municipio, Piazza Umberto I and Via Roma toward the Public Garden. Staircases, bridges and sloping streets are the physical grammar that holds these levels together.
The entire old town forms the Caltagirone component of the UNESCO serial property of the Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto. UNESCO distinguishes it from cities rebuilt elsewhere after the 1693 earthquake: Caltagirone was repaired on its inherited site. The result is neither purely medieval nor uniformly Baroque, but an unusually legible overlap of older urban form and post-seismic architecture.
Ceramic production connects the surrounding clay landscape with domestic life, devotion, commerce and public design. Yet museum evidence must be read precisely: some early objects found in the territory were imported, while local production changed techniques and markets across the centuries. The city remains a centre of active workshops, but continuity should never be used to hide transformation.
The selection
The first four chapters establish the city’s vertical structure and the changing life of its staircase. Eight cross churches, squares, streets and gardens. The final eight follow collections, ceramic knowledge, civic memory and contemporary practice.
RIDGES, CARRUGGI, STAIRS AND BRIDGES EXPLAIN CALTAGIRONE BEFORE ANY SINGLE MONUMENT
Caltagirone is an inherited hill city whose levels were connected rather than replaced after the earthquake.
The historic centre rises and falls across closely built hills. The upper quarter clusters around Santa Maria del Monte and former defensive ground; the civic centre occupies Piazza Municipio and Piazza Umberto I; Via Roma descends toward the Teatrino and Public Garden. Narrow lanes, locally called carruggi, alternate with formal Baroque fronts. Views appear suddenly where streets meet a stair, retaining wall or bridge.
Occupation in the surrounding territory reaches deep into prehistory, while the urban nucleus developed as a defensible medieval settlement. Ligurian, Catalan, Amalfitan and Jewish presences are remembered in the city’s social and architectural history. After the earthquake of 1693, Caltagirone repaired and transformed its old site rather than abandoning it for a wholly new town. This continuity of plan is central to its UNESCO value.
A LONG PUBLIC STAIR CONVERTS DIFFERENCE IN HEIGHT INTO THE MAIN AXIS OF THE CITY
Before it became an icon, the Scala was infrastructure connecting the civic town with the older summit.
The flight rises in a straight, steep perspective between tall façades, shops, doorways and side passages. Its 142 steps demand time and stable footwear; landings are limited and the climb is exposed to summer heat. Looking downward is as informative as looking up: the stair aligns roofs, cupolas and distant agricultural country while keeping everyday entrances immediately beside the visitor route.
The connection was formalised in the early seventeenth century to link the developing lower city with the older Matrice quarter. Later work regularised the route, and twentieth-century ceramic facing created the appearance now known worldwide. The stair therefore belongs to several campaigns rather than one architect or date. Its legal recognition as an authentic historic urban work depends on the surviving relationship with surrounding streets and buildings.
ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO PANELS TURN AN ASCENT INTO A CHRONOLOGY OF SICILIAN DECORATION
The coloured risers are a modern historical anthology, not an ancient surface preserved in place.
Each vertical riser carries a different geometric, vegetal, heraldic or figurative pattern. Cobalt blue, green, yellow, turquoise and manganese tones create a continuous field from a distance, while close inspection reveals changes in period and vocabulary. The horizontal walking surfaces remain stone; dirt, repairs, sunlight and human use are part of the real stair rather than defects to erase from its image.
In 1954 the local ceramic art institute coordinated the facing of the risers with polychrome majolica. The sequence was designed to evoke approximately ten centuries of Sicilian ceramic motifs, moving from earlier Islamic and Norman references through later decorative languages. It is an act of twentieth-century civic design built by ceramic knowledge, not proof that every motif originated on this stair.
TEMPORARY DESIGNS OF FLAME AND FLOWERS MAKE THE MONUMENT A COLLECTIVE EVENT
Festival decorations temporarily transform the Scala; its everyday appearance is different.
During selected feast nights, thousands of small lamps arranged on the steps form a single large design perceived from below. In spring, floral installations create another temporary composition. These events transform circulation, crowd density and the best viewing points; setup and removal are part of the process. On ordinary days the staircase is open stone and ceramic, with no continuous carpet of flowers or fire.
The illuminated Scala is connected above all with celebrations of Saint James in July and has also been repeated for Marian observances in August. The flowered display is associated with May devotion. Designs change rather than reproducing one fixed emblem, and their realisation depends on coordinated civic, religious and volunteer labour. Contemporary scheduling should be distinguished from the longer history of the feasts.
THE CHURCH AT THE SUMMIT MARKS THE RELIGIOUS CENTRE OF THE OLDER FORTIFIED CITY
Santa Maria del Monte is the destination of the stair, but the surrounding high quarter is the larger historical subject.
The church closes the upper perspective with a restrained façade, bell structure and dome visible between neighbouring buildings. Around it, lanes follow the compact grain of the former fortified quarter. The summit offers framed views rather than one open square, and access to the church depends on worship, custodians and events. The interior preserves devotional art and later rebuilding within a much older institutional history.
The Matrice occupied the religious centre of medieval Caltagirone before San Giuliano became cathedral after the creation of the diocese in 1816. Earthquakes and rebuilding altered the church repeatedly, especially after 1693. Its position continued to organise the upper city even as civic activity expanded below and the long stair made the connection more formal.
PALACES, FORMER THEATRE AND PUBLIC PASSAGES REVEAL A CITY GOVERNED BELOW THE OLD SUMMIT
The main civic space is an architectural junction, not an empty forecourt beneath the staircase.
Piazza Municipio gathers the municipal building, Galleria Luigi Sturzo in the former senatorial and theatre complex, the former Monte di Pietà and entrances toward the Scala, Via Duomo and Via Vittorio Emanuele. Different alignments and levels keep the square visually compressed. Stone façades, ceramic signs and moving pedestrian routes make it the practical centre from which several itineraries begin.
The area once known as Malfitania developed as the representative civic centre. Buildings changed purpose: senatorial rooms, theatre, gallery, credit and municipal administration reused the same urban frame. Post-1693 reconstruction shaped much of the visible architecture, while later adaptation prevented the square from becoming a frozen Baroque composition.
CARVED STONE AND A NARROW STREET FRONT TURN JUDICIAL AUTHORITY INTO URBAN THEATRE
The former captain of justice’s court is one of the clearest late-Renaissance civic façades surviving within the rebuilt city.
The building presents a richly articulated stone front along the route near Piazza Municipio. Paired columns, carved frames, heraldic elements and balconies work at the scale of the street rather than a large plaza. Interior use and exhibition access can vary, so the façade is the reliable public encounter. Its warm stone contrasts with the coloured ceramic surfaces for which the city is better known.
The Corte was constructed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for the captain of justice. It is traditionally connected with the architectural culture of the Gagini workshop and survived in altered form through earthquake damage and repair. Its presence is essential because it proves that Caltagirone’s monumental identity was already complex before the post-1693 Baroque campaign.
NORMAN ORIGIN, POST-SEISMIC REBUILDING AND A LIBERTY FRONT BELONG TO ONE ACTIVE CATHEDRAL
San Giuliano is a layered church whose current exterior cannot be assigned to a single Baroque moment.
The cathedral stands near Piazza Umberto I with a tall bell tower and pale, highly modelled façade. The visible front has a strong late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century character, while the interior reflects earlier rebuilding, decoration and diocesan use. Its scale is best understood from the approach through surrounding streets, where the tower repeatedly appears above close roofs.
A church of Norman origin was repeatedly damaged and reconstructed, especially after the earthquake of 1693. San Giuliano became cathedral when the Diocese of Caltagirone was erected in 1816. Later façade work introduced the distinctive Liberty or neo-historic appearance described by official tourism sources. The building is therefore Norman in institutional memory, Baroque in important fabric and modern in its most recognisable front.
THE PATRON’S CHURCH, RELICS AND JULY ROUTES CONNECT DEVOTION WITH THE PUBLIC STAIRCASE
Saint James is not only the theme of a summer illumination; his cult organises places, objects and movement through Caltagirone.
The basilica dedicated to San Giacomo stands within the lower historic centre and remains a focus of patronal devotion. Its interior, treasury and images belong to an active religious setting whose opening can differ from museum hours. During the July celebrations, processions, decorated streets and the illuminated Scala connect the church to the wider city. Outside the feast, these routes must be reconstructed by walking.
Tradition connects devotion to Saint James with the Norman period, while the church was rebuilt after repeated destruction, including the 1693 earthquake. The patronal feast accumulated civic as well as religious meaning. The regional ceramic museum’s current temporary display, titled for James the Greater, demonstrates how devotional imagery, civic identity and ceramic production intersect.
CHURCH, CLOISTER, ARCHIVE, LIBRARY AND GALLERY MAKE ONE COMPLEX OF RELIGIOUS MEMORY
The diocesan museum is not a detached display room but part of the monumental Franciscan and episcopal complex.
At Piazza San Francesco d’Assisi, the former Conventual Franciscan complex contains the Diocesan Museum, archive and library beside the church and cloister. The museum’s twenty-two interpretive points move through silver, vestments, sculpture, maiolica and more than thirty paintings. A fifteenth-century Flemish panel associated with Vrancke van der Stockt forms a major focus, while the neo-Gothic chapel supports temporary exhibitions.
The Franciscan foundation traces its institutional memory to the thirteenth century and was rebuilt repeatedly. The complex later served diocesan and seminary functions; the diocese dates from 1816, and the episcopal seat was established here in the early twentieth century. The museum was developed to protect works from the cathedral and churches across the Calatino territory, including objects removed from buildings no longer safely accessible.
A MASONRY BRIDGE TURNS A RAVINE AND DIFFERENCE IN LEVEL INTO A CEREMONIAL STREET
Caltagirone’s bridges are as important as its stairs because they reveal how separated hills became one city.
The bridge carries the urban route toward the San Francesco complex across a steep change in ground. Arches and parapets are seen both as engineering from below and as street surface from above. Ceramic panels and later decorative interventions reinforce its civic image, but the essential fact is movement: pedestrians and local traffic cross a gap that would otherwise divide neighbourhoods.
The connection developed within early-modern efforts to make the expanding town more continuous. Reconstruction and later strengthening altered the bridge after seismic damage. Like the Scala, it demonstrates that monumental Caltagirone was shaped by practical works of circulation. Decoration came to inhabit infrastructure rather than replace its function.
THE DESCENT FROM CIVIC CENTRE TO LANDSCAPED GARDEN REVEALS THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY CITY
Via Roma broadens Caltagirone beyond its medieval lanes and carries the visitor toward museum and garden architecture.
Via Roma descends past palaces and long views to the Teatrino, a curved architectural entrance historically associated with the ceramic museum route, and the Public Garden. The garden uses terraces, paths, planting, pavilions and ceramic details to create a formal civic landscape at the lower edge of the centre. Shade and benches make it a useful counterpoint to the exposed Scala.
The avenue and garden express nineteenth-century ambitions for promenade, hygiene and public display. Garden design and architectural features were developed across successive campaigns rather than opened as one unchanged ensemble. The former regional ceramic museum entrance at the garden added a modern cultural layer; the collection has since moved temporarily, so the old route no longer describes current museum access.
A COLLECTION OF MORE THAN TWO THOUSAND OBJECTS IS CURRENTLY READ THROUGH A TEMPORARY PALACE DISPLAY
The museum exists, but its historic, temporary and future addresses must be kept distinct.
The historic museum building in the Public Garden is not the current visitor entrance. A selection of approximately two hundred works is displayed at Palazzo Libertini di San Marco in Via Taranto, while the former Convent of Sant’Agostino is being prepared as the intended permanent home. The active regional information page lists Palazzo Libertini, daily opening and current ticketing; these details can change as the transfer progresses.
Founded in 1965, the museum was Italy’s second specialised ceramic museum after Faenza. Its complete holdings exceed 2,500 objects and range from Sicilian prehistory to the early twentieth century. Structural problems closed the historic garden building; temporary displays opened at Palazzo Libertini in 2025 and were expanded later that year. The relocation is itself a chapter in the preservation of the collection.
PREHISTORIC FINDS AND GREEK VESSELS SHOW THAT LOCAL MATERIAL AND IMPORTED OBJECTS TELL DIFFERENT STORIES
The earliest ceramics in the museum cannot all be used as evidence of one uninterrupted Caltagirone workshop tradition.
The regional collection includes Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age material from the territory, a limestone relief with paired sphinxes from Monte San Mauro, and major Attic vessels. A black-figure krater of about 530–520 BC represents mythic combat; a red-figure krater of about 440 BC shows a potter finishing a vessel at the wheel with an apprentice under Athena Ergane. These objects connect local archaeology with wider Mediterranean exchange.
Communities around Caltagirone used and deposited fired clay long before the medieval town. Greek-period sites participated in routes through which Attic pottery reached Sicily. The potter scene is invaluable evidence for ancient craft imagery, but the vessel is Attic, not a documentary photograph of a local Caltagirone workshop. Archaeology establishes long engagement with ceramic objects while demanding precision about production and provenance.
GLAZE, PIGMENT, FORM AND FIRING TURN EARTH INTO TABLEWARE, PHARMACY VESSELS AND ARCHITECTURAL SURFACE
Caltagirone’s ceramic history is a sequence of technical and commercial changes rather than a single decorative style.
Museum displays and local collections allow comparison among storage jars, basins, pharmacy vessels, tableware, devotional objects, floor tiles and architectural maiolica. Form reveals function before decoration: a large jar, albarello and stair riser solve different problems. Glaze colour and painted vocabulary vary with period, workshop, market and restoration. Close looking is more useful than searching for one supposedly typical pattern.
Medieval Islamic Sicily contributed important glazing, kiln and decorative knowledge, while later Norman, Aragonese and Spanish networks reshaped production and demand. Caltagirone’s access to clay and fuel supported workshops, but products also circulated and absorbed motifs from elsewhere. Early-modern pharmacies, households, churches and noble patrons created specialised markets. Earthquake rebuilding opened further demand for architectural ceramic.
WHEELS, MOULDS, BRUSHES, KILNS AND APPRENTICESHIP KEEP CERAMIC KNOWLEDGE IN MOTION
Living production is best understood through work processes and individual makers, not by treating every shop as equivalent.
Workshops across the centre produce tableware, architectural pieces, sculpture, nativity figures and contemporary design. Some makers throw forms at the wheel; others use moulds, hand-building, modelling or specialised painting. Kiln technology, purchased materials, safety standards and online markets have changed the work. A serious visit asks who designed and made an object, what process was used and whether production occurred locally.
In the early nineteenth century Giacomo Bongiovanni developed expressive terracotta figures of workers, musicians, shepherds and brigands by applying thin modelled layers to small bodies. Bongiovanni and later Vaccaro production became important to the city’s nativity tradition. Twentieth-century schools, exhibitions and public commissions extended ceramic work into design and civic space, while individual workshops continued to evolve rather than repeat one inherited formula.
A RARE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PRISON NOW HOLDS ARCHAEOLOGY, PAINTING AND THE RECORDS OF CIVIC LIFE
The museum building and its collections tell two different but connected histories of institutions.
The civic museum occupies rooms of the late eighteenth-century Bourbon prison designed by the Syracusan architect Natale Bonaiuto. The severe plan, internal circulation and controlled openings remain part of the visit. Collections combine archaeology, a picture gallery and historical works linked to the former Universitas and the city’s religious and civic administration. Opening information on national records may be incomplete or stale.
The prison belongs to Enlightenment-era attempts to organise confinement through purpose-built architecture. Its later conversion to museum changed use while preserving an uncommon building type. The picture gallery documents the strength of local and regional artistic patronage; civic objects show that Caltagirone’s identity was produced by institutions, confraternities and government as well as ceramic workshops.
A FORMER WOMEN’S HOSPITAL SHOWS THAT CALTAGIRONE’S MATERIAL TRADITION CONTINUES THROUGH EXPERIMENT
Contemporary collections prevent the ceramic city from ending with historical vessels and souvenir forms.
The museum is housed in the late eighteenth-century Ospedale delle Donne, whose nineteenth-century neo-Renaissance front forms part of the experience. Its core includes work by Caltagirone artist Gianni Ballarò and acquisitions connected with National Ceramic Reviews from the 1980s onward. Sculpture, vessel, abstraction and mixed techniques broaden the meaning of ceramic beyond utilitarian or traditional decoration.
The institution opened in 1996 after Ballarò’s widow donated his works. Municipal acquisitions, gifts and the history of national ceramic exhibitions expanded the collection. Reusing a former charitable and medical building for contemporary art created another institutional layer within the old city. The museum documents deliberate rupture and experimentation as much as continuity.
SMALL OBJECTS, TEXTILES, TABERNACLES AND PAINTINGS REVEAL A DIFFERENT ECONOMY OF DEVOTION
The Capuchin collection adds fragile materials and Franciscan patronage to a city too often represented only through glazed clay.
The museum preserves silver, textiles, statuettes in alabaster, wood and wax, inlaid tabernacles, paintings and donated polychrome terracotta sculpture. Works associated with artists such as Filippo Paladini, Semplice da Verona, Mario Minniti and Pietro Novelli place local devotion within wider Sicilian and Italian artistic networks. Display conditions and access should be confirmed because church museums often operate differently from regional sites.
Objects accumulated through Capuchin worship, patronage, gifts and the practical life of the community. Their materials require conservation strategies unlike stone architecture or robust glazed ware. The collection helps recover the role of religious orders in commissioning, safeguarding and moving art, especially when suppression, rebuilding and changing use dispersed original settings.
A QUIET EXTERIOR OPENS INTO TEN CHAPELS, ILLUSIONISTIC PAINTING AND A HISTORY OF LOSS AND RECOVERY
San Bonaventura demonstrates that access to Caltagirone’s heritage is an active result of conservation, not a permanent condition.
The church has a restrained façade with nineteenth-century polychrome majolica panels of Saint Francis and the Madonna della Salute. Inside, five chapels on each side lead toward a richly painted presbytery whose illusionistic architecture culminates in the Glory of Saint Bonaventure by Paolo Vasta and his circle. After eight years of closure and restoration, the church reopened on 26 March 2026 for monthly celebrations, booked visits and cultural events.
Founded by the Reformed Friars Minor in 1631, the church was repeatedly rebuilt after earthquakes. Wealthy families financed chapels and obtained burial places in crypts below them, connecting decoration with social history. A seventeenth-century painting by Vincenzo Roggeri stolen in 1990 was recovered decades later and entrusted to the Diocesan Museum for conservation, making loss, policing and restoration part of the monument’s modern biography.
The city through time
The chronology separates ancient material evidence from medieval urban formation, post-seismic repair, industrial change and the modern museum city.
Communities occupy the Calatino landscape and use fired clay; archaeological collections preserve Eneolithic and Early Bronze Age material from the territory.
Greek-period sites participate in Mediterranean exchange; imported Attic vessels and the Monte San Mauro sphinx relief enter the archaeological record.
Muslim Sicily strengthens technical, agricultural and commercial networks; later tradition closely associates Caltagirone’s name and ceramic identity with this period.
Norman and later medieval rule consolidate the fortified upper town, churches and communities linked to wider Ligurian, Catalan, Amalfitan and Jewish networks.
Civic palaces, the Corte Capitaniale, bridges and the long urban stair formalise connections between the old summit and expanding lower city.
Earthquake damage leads to repair and Baroque transformation on the inherited site; churches, palaces and infrastructure are reconstructed without abandoning the old town.
The Diocese of Caltagirone is created, San Giuliano becomes cathedral, public gardens and museums develop, and Bongiovanni’s expressive terracotta figures reshape local production.
Liberty and neo-historic work alter major façades; ceramic education and civic design culminate in the 1954 facing of the Scala’s 142 risers.
The Regional Ceramic Museum opens, contemporary collections grow, and Caltagirone’s entire old town enters the UNESCO Late Baroque serial property.
Structural closure and relocation put the ceramic collection in temporary Palazzo Libertini displays while Sant’Agostino is prepared; San Bonaventura reopens after restoration in 2026.
Before your visit
The Scala alone is not the itinerary. High quarter, civic squares, cathedral, San Francesco, Via Roma, garden and workshops require repeated changes in level; the museums cannot all be absorbed between them.
The 142-step Scala is only the most visible climb. Carruggi, side stairs, sloping streets and limited shade make footwear, water and slower pacing important.
The Regional Ceramic Museum is temporarily at Palazzo Libertini, MACC is recorded closed, the Civic Museum has uncertain hours and San Bonaventura uses booked or event access. One opening schedule does not cover the city.
Scala Illuminata, floral installation, patronal processions and special church openings change routes and crowd conditions. Consult official current programmes before building a journey around them.
This guide cross-checks UNESCO, the Sicilian Region’s archaeological park and official tourism portal, the Municipality of Caltagirone, the Diocese and the Italian Ministry of Culture. It distinguishes inherited urban form from post-1693 repair, seventeenth-century staircase from 1954 ceramic facing, local production from imported archaeological objects, permanent architecture from festival design, complete collections from temporary displays and institutional existence from confirmed current access.
The hero image is an illustration, not a photograph. Institutional reference photographs remain archived locally for visual verification. Museum relocations, restoration works, church access, workshop visits, festival dates, processions, traffic controls and ticket information can change; consult the linked official pages shortly before visiting.
