Day 01
Caltagirone's Gardens, Baroque Center, and Ceramic Staircase
- The guided tour in Caltagirone begins at the Public Garden, one of the 10 most beautiful gardens in Italy. Designed in the English style, it features an Art Nouveau entrance that opens onto an internal avenue where you can admire statues, pottery vases, majolica, flower boxes, and a monumental fountain.
- The splendid garden also houses a Moorish-style music stage with ceramic decorations and the Teatrino Belvedere, which offers a spectacular view over the whole city.
- Passing by the Ceramics Museum, we continue along the main street leading to the heart of the historic center, where we reach a characteristic panoramic point built in the 1700s: the Tondo Vecchio. Shaped like a theater and embellished with decorations, the town's coats of arms, and the Sicilian symbol of the Trinacria, it offers beautiful views of the mountains and valleys surrounding Caltagirone.
- The tour continues across the San Francesco Bridge, made up of five arches and built in the seventeenth century to connect two of the three hills on which the town stands. It is decorated with beautiful relief pottery created by local artists. As we walk through the streets of the historic center, the noble palaces and beautiful churches decorated in Baroque and Art Nouveau style are truly striking, and among so much artistic beauty we reach the Cathedral of San Giuliano with its imposing 48-meter-high bell tower.
- The Basilica, in floral Liberty style, has a beautiful dome entirely covered with majolica. Inside, the church preserves numerous frescoes from the Old and New Testaments and a precious Baroque wooden choir. A few steps away is the very central Piazza del Municipio, overlooked by elegant buildings such as the neoclassical Palazzo dell'Aquila and the former Palazzo Senatorio, transformed over time into a theater and now home to the Luigi Sturzo Gallery.
- The guided tour ends at one of the symbolic places of Caltagirone, the famous staircase of S. Maria del Monte, built in the 1600s to connect the historic center with the newer part of the town.
- This beautiful staircase, made up of 142 steps decorated with colorful ceramic tiles, is adorned with flowers during the Infiorata event in May and illuminated with 4,000 candles that create an evocative design during the celebrations for the feast of the Patron Saint.
