This week’s dream: Sicily’s Baroque towns

With its historic towns, dramatic landscape and superb cuisine, the Sicilian region of Ragusa is ravishing, says Lee Marshall in Condé Nast Traveller. So it’s hard to fathom why, until recently, so few tourists bothered with it. Perhaps its own people, who are delightfully "easygoing and unshowy", never realised its potential as a holiday destination, or else preferred not to boast about it to foreigners. In any case, journalists in the UK and elsewhere have stepped in lately to do the job for them – and, as a result, the region is well on its way to becoming "the Tuscany of the south".

Ragusa is a "rich agricultural land" in the far south of Sicily, its "rugged, eroded" hills swathed in carob and olive groves. Its most beautiful towns – Ragusa, Modica and Scicli – are "stunningly located" on rocky outcrops or in "steep-sided gullies". All were devastated by a "cataclysmic" earthquake in 1693 and rebuilt in fine style shortly afterwards, under the auspices of Sicily’s Spanish overlords. Hence their "peculiarly Iberian" mixture of "grand, rational plans" and fantastical Baroque detail.

In the city of Ragusa, the old, medieval town partly survived the earthquake. Today just a "tumble of houses, domes and towers", it clings to a rocky spur between two deep gorges, while the new, Baroque neighbourhood sits above it on the hillside opposite. Modica is a similarly dramatic "cascade" of "sun-bleached houses and churches", including a Byzantine chapel, hewn into the rock. It was once a "cultural hothouse", but suffered centuries of economic decline. Now, however, tourism has reversed that trend, and many of its "humble, family-run" restaurants have gone upmarket. Charming Scicli, nearby, is enjoying a similar renaissance. It is like a smaller version of Modica, and lies "amid wild, airy country" very close to the sea.

British Airways (0844 493 0787) flies to Catania, which is less than two hours from Ragusa by car.

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