Comiso

Gesualdo Bufalino lived his whole life in Comiso, teaching in silence until, at sixty-one, Diceria dell'untore revealed him as one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century: the foundation that keeps his library and papers is today the intellectual heart of the town. Around it stands the Iblean baroque of churches and squares, and the pietra di Comiso, the pale limestone from the quarries that built half the province; and underneath, the Roman baths of the Diana spring, with a mosaic floor where Neptune sits among nereids riding tritons. The same goddess is on the town's arms, seated on an overturned jug, with a motto that makes a promise: after the end of Casmene, I rise again in splendour.

That motto the town had to earn once more. In 1981 the government decided to install in the old airfield a NATO base with a hundred and twelve nuclear-armed Cruise missiles, and Comiso found itself suddenly inside world politics: more than a hundred thousand people came from all over Italy to the demonstration the following spring, pacifists camped in the fields around the runways, and the year after that the first American troops arrived. Then the Reagan and Gorbachev agreement swept the Euromissiles away, and in 1991 the last battery left. In 1999 those same hangars took in more than five thousand Kosovar refugees, and Comiso found itself with a new name: City of Peace. On the hill of Canicarao stands one of the very few Buddhist pagodas in Europe, built entirely of the local white stone. From the same runways, named after Pio La Torre, who had backed that peace movement, people now fly: Ragusa Ibla, Modica and Scicli are half an hour away.