What to see · Santo Stefano Quisquina

More places of interest

• Chiesa San Calogero

  In Sicily the mountains dedicated to saint Calogero are many, and nearly all of them have a small church on top. Calogero is the hermit saint of the island par excellence, the one who according to tradition went about preaching and withdrew to the heights, and his cult has left a network of summits bearing his name. This is one of them.

  What to see

  The church stands on the peak of monte San Calogero, at nearly a thousand metres, and you reach it by a track through the wood. It is small and has been restored several times, the last in the nineteen-eighties; on the date of construction the local sources waver between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century.

  Inside there is a bronze bust of the saint and an altar with a relief showing him looking at the mountain, plus two canvases with episodes of his life. It is not much, but the strong point is not the furnishing: it is the position, silent and panoramic, in the middle of the Sicani mountains.

  Visiting

  You climb from Santo Stefano Quisquina, in the Agrigento hinterland, by a small road through the wood; there are no hours, and access to the church depends on openings and on the feast. Half a day counting the climb.

  Our editors' tip

  In the same municipality is the hermitage of Santa Rosalia alla Quisquina, the cave where the patron of Palermo lived as a hermit before withdrawing to monte Pellegrino, and from there the Itinerarium Rosaliae starts. Two hermits, two mountains, one municipality: this corner of the Sicani was for centuries the place where people went to be alone.

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