Page 386 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

quite a walk, and you will probably still have to stop several people to ask the way

before you find it. Tues–Sat dinner only.

< Back to Siracusa and the southeast

Scicli

Ten kilometres south of Modica, SCICLI is dramatically pitched against the bottom of
a knobbly limestone bluff. Like southeast Sicily’s other Baroque towns, it has seen
quite a restoration in recent years, most strikingly on the main Piazza Italia and the

pedestrianized Via Mormina Penna – a scenographer’s dream of a street, lined with
exuberant and painstakingly restored Baroque churches and palazzi, including the
Municipio fronted by a marvellous sculptural staircase and a small bandstand.

If it is open, be sure to step inside the church of San Giovanni Battista, which holds
one of the strangest images of Christ you are likely ever to see, standing before a
crucifix dressed in what appears to be a long white skirt. Dating back to the

seventeenth century, it originated in the Spanish city of Burgos, where representing
Christ in a skirt (actually his death shroud) was normal, and was given to the city by a
Spanish nobleman. Gender norms are challenged once again in the town’s main
church, Sant’Ignazio or the Chiesa Madre, which holds Italy’s only representation of
the Madonna as a belligerent horseriding warrior.

IL GRUPPO DI SCICLI

Sampieri beach, down the road from Scicli, is the spiritual home of a group of artists
known as the Gruppo di Scicli. For over thirty years they met here every morning, to
walk together on the strand before starting work. They walk less often now – the

oldest members of the Gruppo are over eighty and the younger ones live away in
Modica or Catania – but they still come down for a stroll occasionally.

Since its beginnings in the 1980s, the Gruppo di Scicli has shrunk and grown and
shrunk again, accommodating and adapting, like an extended family. At present it has
nine members. Operating outside the mainstream of contemporary art, the Gruppo
has no manifesto or ideology. The artists were brought together by their shared
approaches to painting, sculpture, light and landscape and, not least, in how they

wanted to live.

Having exhibited widely – in group and solo shows – all over Italy, October 2012
saw the first Gruppo di Scicli exhibition abroad, at the Bernaducci Meisel Gallery
in New York. In Scicli, their works can be seen on the walls of the Hotel
Novecento, and often at the QUAM art gallery, Via Mormino Penna 79 (Tues–Sat
10am–1pm & 4.30–8pm, Sun and hols 5.30–8.30pm; 0932 931 154,