Tourism and tourist places in Sortino: La Porta di Pantalica and the museum of Puppets Opera

From Sortino, walking for few kilometres, you can enter Pantalica Valley, watching from the top a wonderful landscape crossed by the Calcinara and Anapo rivers.

Sortino is a splendid town inhabited since the Bronze Age and probably destroyed by the Siracusans before 664 BC. Later on it was inhabited by the Arabs and the Normans.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the archaeologist Paolo Orsi started his researches and founded the wonderful site we can admire today. He also discovered a huge number of tombs.

Mr. Orsi divided them into five groups: the North-west necropolis - 600 tombs; the Northern necropolis - 1500 tombs; the eastern necropolis, called Cavetta, - almost 350 tombs; the Southern necropolis - 700 tombs; and finally the necropolis of Filiporto - more than 500.

The tombs included in the Northern and North-western necropolis date back to the Bronze Age, the other three necropoli date back to the Iron Age.

To the Byzantine period belong the ruins of four villages and thre little churches.

In the first settlement there is the wonderful Oratory of the Crucifix, a grotto where you can admire the frescos representing the Crucifixion and St. Nicholas.

The second settlement, situated at the beginning of the Eastern necropolis, includes 70 dwellings.

In the third settlement, South of Pantalica, there is the Oratory of St. Nicolicchio adorned with frescoes and inscriptions.

The most interesting is doubtless the fourth settlement, to the West, formed by more than 150 dwellings and the church of St. Micidiario.

Of great historical and archaeological interest is the Palace, a structure formed by four rooms.

The museum of Puppets Opera

Prepared in public square S. Francisco, dedicated to Ignazio Puglisi, the museum of the Work of the Pupi with its exposure cured in the particular minimums offers of the wonderful pictures of sicilianit

In the museum they can be more admired than the thirty pupi inserted in various scenes and characteristic one teatrino, in a distance between music, games of light and objects of other times.

To make to live again, today, the gesta of the champions of France is the cultural Association dedicated to the puparo sortinese.