Niscemi

The cork wood of Niscemi is a green monument: almost three thousand hectares of cork oaks and holm oaks, one of the last great remnants of the forest that once covered south-central Sicily, now a nature reserve and a protected European site. Under the same canopy, however, there is something else: in the wood stands one of the four ground stations of the United States navy's satellite communications system, with three great dish antennas, and before that there was an installation of forty-five high-frequency aerials plus one low-frequency mast, used to speak with submarines below the surface. The town's other pride is in the vegetable plot: the artichoke, which has its own festival every year.

Niscemi is not a village that grew of itself, it is a founded town. On the thirtieth of June 1626 the viceroy granted the licence to populate the fief of Nixeme to the mother of the young Giuseppe Branciforte, who the following year obtained from Philip IV the title of prince of Niscemi; and around 1640 Branciforte gave the settlement the plan it still has, a grid of rectangular blocks around the main square. The earthquake of 1693 did damage and forced the churches to be rebuilt, but it did not move a single street. On the nineteenth of March 1790, by contrast, the southern slope began to move: fissures opened, underground noises were heard, heat and vapours came out and finally mud. At the time they took it for an eruption; today we know it was a landslide. From the edge of the plateau the eye runs over the plain of Gela to the sea.