There's [ceramics? I guess?] in them thar hills!

After the jump: Ragusa! And a little bit of Noto! It's hill town time, cats and kittens!

Ragusa, when it gets written about, is mostly written about as an ideal base for exploring the hill-town region of southeastern Sicily, and I get it! Along with Modica (which I very much want to visit on my next Sicilian sojourn) it's a visually spectacular town that's actually not that hard to explore in a day or two, and like Siracusa/Ortigia, it's a town with an "old city" (Ibla) that's almost empty save for tourists, restaurants, museums, and shops, and a "new town" with some appeal but mostly just your standard-issue somewhere-in-Italy kinda 20th century vibes.

Let us not, however, lose track of the "visually spectacular" bit of this.

Which is to say, if you spent a few days here, driving to other small hill towns or down to the beaches, it's a pretty ideal place to stroll in the evenings or early in the mornings, but especially in the summer once the concert and theatre seasons have wound down, you might not particularly need to extend your stay. This worked out pretty well for me, not because I drove (no cars! cars bad even when necessary for employment!) but because the temps skyrocketed to one hundred (100) degrees fahrenheit. In my opinion, where I come from, that's stupid and bad!

But it worked out okay - I had a truly perfect guesthouse room with a terrace overlooking the stunning vista of the new town, and the mercy of air conditioning, and this stay coincided with my self-imposed deadline to get pitches in for the coming year's productions at my college. That meant the weather-inspired schedule of "get up early, go for a long walk, have breakfast back at the place, get work done til it starts cooling off in the early evening, take a long stroll, have dinner, sit on the terrace watching the sun set over a drink, go to bed" was: quite literally perfect.

I had probably the sole "fancy" meal of this trip in Ragusa, and they gave my espresso a HAT at the end of it! ESPRESSOHAT.

What was nice was that, even though Ragusa Ibla was not exactly packed with residents doing their daily shopping and hanging out in the piazzas as families, most of the tourists were Italian (with a few Germans as well) and a number of folk who I met who worked in the various shops and markets and restaurants were incredibly passionate about what they did, and about retaining the local culture. My favorite, probably, was a guy who couldn't have styled himself to look more like Mario (the famous Mario! from plumbing and video games!) if he had been trying on purpose, who ran an astonishingly delicious sandwich shop highlighting regional ingredients. It's one of those classic "we do one thing" spots: bread with local grains, about 7-10 ingredients mixed and matched in various combinations across a menu of options, some filled-in-the-moment cannoli, and beers brewed with the same local grains as the bread. He radiated excitement and pride on a 100-degree day, joking about bringing me a candle as the sun went down because I looked so cold, entertaining kids who had stopped by with their parents to get cannoli, and generally seemingly over the moon to get to do what he does.

There were also, within the city walls: teens!

If I were advising someone planning a trip, I... might send them to Ragusa. But I'm also very curious about Modica, which has a reputation for leftist politics and a similar "up the side of a steep incline" geography, while being a little bit more central for day tripping. I would probably advise driving - there are some villages I just couldn't visit because bus schedules were not friendly, though I was happy to fit in the baroque-crazy Noto in on my way to Ragusa, not just because I was ultimately able to help two awesomely adventurous retiree Americans navigate their own bus tickets to Ragusa, and help navigate them to their hotel when they jumped off the bus with me several stops before they should have. (It was also because them GOOFY HEADS supporting the balconies! Peep that video! Them heads is goofy!) But if you're looking for some smaller-town Sicily, perhaps especially off-season, this is a region worth exploring, I think.

Although (and again, foreshadowing) if you shortchange Palermo for Ragusa by even one second I will weep for your loss, and beg you to reconsider. Up next (unless I throw together another grab bag or "you know what's supposedly interesting about travel, is how sometimes you eat different food" post of general inanity)... I stop handwaving beautiful corners of a wonderful part of the world and get down to explaining why Palermo is good! (Spoiler: it's because it's neat!!!!!!!)

Hm Ragusa is also Nice, however, if I did not make this clear.