Igot a taste of Baroque
Igot a taste of Baroque Sicily well before my plane touched down on Italian soil. The buzzed-about southeastern portion of the island, best known for its exuberant architecture and throat-tickling olive oil, is also possessed of a certain… je couldn’t care less. I discovered this while planning my itinerary. Emails to hotels and restaurants were met with coy silences or suggestions that I call somebody’s cousin or the night guard. A friend of a friend managed to track down a resident of Noto, the area’s most fashionable town, who offered to go by foot and visit a few establishments on my behalf. The following day he proudly reported that his dealings had been successful and attached the contact information for the proprietor of a hotel: a screen grab of a single phone number beneath a photograph of two handsome men with their shirts unbuttoned down to there. And yet I only found myself more determined – and possibly a little intrigued – by a land that evinced so little interest in winning me over. Perhaps it sensed that it already had my devotion, which traces back to my twenties, when I discovered Sicilian author Andrea Camilleri’s books about Inspector Montalbano, an existentialist foodie detective who roams and three-hour-lunches his way through the region. Fast-forward to my thirties, when I took the advice of a well-meaning colleague at the fashion magazine where I worked and rebranded my look as “Sicilian princess” (this enterprise involved a reliance on organic fabrics in creams and blacks and styling my hair with a severe centre part). I finally made it to Sicily last summer and spent three heady days in the capital, Palermo, falling for the real Sicilian princesses, as well as the stray cats, with their pagan-god faces. The Noto Valley, a walnut-shaped region that stretches from industrial Catania through Noto to the towns of Modica and Ragusa, has become a destination for in-theknow Europeans and the American magazine editors › From left: the recently opened boutique hotel a.d. 1768, in Ragusa Ibla, is filled with contemporary art; the pool at Jacques Garcia Noto CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM 49
From left: local kids biking in the small town of Scicli in Ragusa; a communal area in a.d. 1768 who travel like them. The latter scatter breadcrumbs on Instagram – an ancient bust here, a stunning stone archway there. The mania intensified in September last year when it played host to the wedding of mega-popular Italian fashion blogger Chiara Ferragni, aka the Blonde Salad, and elaborately tattooed rapper Federico “Fedez” Leonardo Lucia. “It’s welcoming, but it’s private” is how Italian Vogue writer and part-time Ragusa resident Angelo Flaccavento explained the region. “Everything happens behind a closed door. You just need to find somebody to open it.” While the area has long had a certain cachet among these insiders – many of whom were drawn to the smalltown-Sicily feel and the Seven Rooms Villadorata, a gorgeous, culty hotel set in a wing of a Baroque palaz zo – now others are following suit. A scattering of new hotels is keeping to the area’s quiet charm, wearing luxury with an understated elegance – or, in the case of French interior designer Jacques Garcia’s new place in Noto’s foothills, with unapologetic opulence. The streets were dark when my husband, Ben, and I pulled into Noto. I stepped out of the rental car to the sound of live piano music and applause spilling from the balconied windows of Palazzo Nicolaci, and I was overcome with the sense that the palace – one of several in town – was not only alive but greeting us. “Oh, that must have been the costume party!” said Bruno, the manager of our bed-andbreakfast, San Carlo Suites, the next morning. “Everybody there was dressed up in 18th-century attire,” he added matter-of-factly, and peered out the window. I joined him and saw that it had rained overnight, and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, the town’s main street, was cast in a dreamy 50 CENTURION-MAGAZINE.COM
