The walls of the two canyons are drilled like a honeycomb: square cells cut into the limestone, one beside the other, for kilometres of rock. They are tombs. The traditional count gives 5,000 of them; the most recent survey stops just under 4,000. The Sicels cut them between the 13th and the 7th century BC, after the coastal settlements were abandoned and the population shut itself onto this spur between the Anapo and the Calcinara, guarded by valleys that are almost impassable. Pantalica held out for some six hundred years, from about 1250 to 650 BC; some archaeologists identify it with Hybla, city of king Hyblon, who according to Thucydides granted the Megarians the ground where Megara Hyblaea was founded in 728 BC. Since 2005 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Syracuse.
What to see
Five cemeteries have been identified, reached by paths and viewing platforms. Filiporto, on the Ferla side, holds almost a thousand tombs and runs beside a huge ditch cut in the rock: Greek military engineering, probably 4th century BC, possibly tied to the defences of Dionysius of Syracuse. The North West necropolis is among the oldest, 12th and 11th century BC; the Cavetta mixes tombs with rock-cut houses; the North is the most startling, a thousand cells on sheer walls above the Calcinara; the South follows the Anapo for more than a kilometre.
On top of the spur stands the anaktoron, the so-called prince's palace: the only stone building on the site, squared blocks and rectangular rooms, excavated by Paolo Orsi. Its date is argued over, Late Bronze Age for some and with Mycenaean echoes, but its Byzantine use is certain, attested by roof tiles and pottery. Byzantine too are the rock-cut villages and the three small chapels hollowed into the cliff, the Grotta del Crocifisso, San Nicolicchio and San Micidiario, where very faint fresco traces survive, a Pantocrator between two angels. In the San Martino cemetery the hypogeum of Dionysius carries an inscription at the entrance: «Dionysius, who served as presbyter of the Erghitan Church for 34 years, sleeps here his eternal sleep».
Visiting
There is no single entrance and no single route: Pantalica is walked. Two ways in: from Ferla a road climbs onto the plateau by car, from the Sortino side you go down on foot along the old mule track and cross the Calcinara. Along the valley floor runs the bed of the railway dismantled in 1956, now a level path through tunnels and over bridges, with the restored old station and its panels on local wildlife: the easiest way to stay inside the gorge. The main cemeteries and the anaktoron take a full day, walking shoes and water in the pack, because in the middle hours there is almost no shade. The whole area lies in the Pantalica, Anapo Valley and Cava Grande nature reserve.
Our editors' tip
We would pair the walk with the Paolo Orsi archaeological museum in Syracuse: the grave goods taken from these tombs, burnished red pots, bronze fibulae, rings, daggers, are on show there, and without them the cliffs stay a wall of holes. And go when the light is low, early morning or the last hour of the afternoon: raking across the rock it picks out the cells one by one, and the canyon stops being a view and becomes a census.