Pantalica, the city of the dead carved into the rock

There are places in Italy where the crowds simply don't arrive, and Pantalica is one of them. A few kilometres from Sortino, in the heart of south-eastern Sicily, a great limestone promontory is ringed by deep gorges carved over millennia by the Anapo and Calcinara rivers. On those vertical walls, the eye loses count of thousands of small dark openings: they are tombs, carved by hand into the rock between the thirteenth and seventh centuries BC.

The city of tombs

The burials are estimated at around five thousand, spread across several necropolises around the promontory. The northern necropolis alone, overlooking the rapids of the Calcinara, counts about a thousand of them, lined up along the steep flanks like the windows of a vertical city. For archaeologists they are the testimony of the Sicel civilisation, the peoples who inhabited this corner of Sicily before the arrival of the Greek colonists. At the top of the plateau remain the ruins of the Anaktoron, a building of large stone blocks, interpreted as the prince's palace.

A living landscape

The extraordinary thing is that here you don't visit a fenced-off museum, but a living landscape. Pantalica is also a nature reserve: among the tombs run clear waters, plane trees and wild oleanders grow, and in the pools of the Anapo you can swim in summer. The silence is almost total, broken only by the wind and the call of the birds of prey that nest on the walls.

Far from the crowds

Precisely because it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005, you'd expect the throng: instead, those who make it up here find trails almost deserted, far from the mass tourism that besieges Syracuse and the nearby sea. It's best to come on foot, with proper shoes, water and no hurry. You enter from Sortino or from the Ferla side, descend into the gorge and walk for hours between prehistory and nature.

Leave the tombs as you found them, don't remove stones or flowers, take your rubbish away. Pantalica has survived intact for three thousand years: it's up to us not to ruin it.

Related guides: Eastern Sicily by train: Catania, Syracuse and the Val di Noto without a car.

How to get there

Pantalica is reached by car, with two main entrances overlooking the Anapo Valley: the one on the Ferla side and the one on the Sortino side. From Syracuse you take the main roads towards Floridia and Solarino as far as Ferla, about an hour's journey. The reference airport is Fontanarossa in Catania, from which Sortino is roughly half an hour away. There are no railway stations near the site, so your own vehicle is the most practical solution.

Practical guides for Catania

• Where to stay in Catania
• What to see in Catania in 2 days
• Where to eat in Catania
• How to get to Catania