Above the castle gate is a Latin inscription saying: what pleased the Sicilians, Sperlinga alone refused. It refers to 1282, the year of the Vespers, when the whole island rose against the Angevins and drove them out: here it did not. The castle held out for more than a year sheltering the French, and since then that sentence has been the village's identity.
What to see
The fortress is not built on the rock, it is dug into it: the halls, corridors, stables, cisterns and stairs are cut out of the sandstone, and the masonry parts are only additions. You climb steps cut in the stone up to the tower, and from there you look over the Nebrodi and the inland hills.
Below the castle, along the ridge, are the inhabited caves: houses dug into the rock and used as dwellings until a few decades ago, with walls blackened by smoke and niches for objects. Some can be visited and show how life was lived, and it is not as distant a past as it seems.
Visiting
The castle is at Sperlinga, in the province of Enna, an hour by car from Nicosia and the main roads; paid ticket, with shorter hours out of season. An hour and a half with the caves.
Our editors' tip
Touch the walls inside the halls: you feel the chisel marks that hollowed the rock, one by one, to make the rooms. A built castle is a work of carrying and laying; this one is a work of subtraction, and it is a way of thinking architecture that has left traces all over Sicily.