The town of Buscemi, perched on a hill a few kilometres from Palazzolo, possesses a singular and interesting museum, I Luoghi del Lavoro Contadino ("Peasant Work Places"), the rooms of which are scattered all around the town. Substantially there are eight rooms that present the work and life of the people of the Hyblaean Mountains, ranging from the workshops of the blacksmith, the cobbler, and the carpenter.

Along the road that runs from Trapani to Paceco and Marsala, skirting the lagoon of lo Stagnone where Motya lies, it is possible to see numerous dazzlingly white mountains shimmering in the sun. These are not snow-capped mountains but hills of salt, one of the Sicilian economy's historical resources that was already very precious in the days of the Phoenicians.

A double murder that at the time touched public opinion and caused great scandal, passed down to posterity in a little poem in Sicilian dialect entitled "The Bitter Case of the Baroness of Carini" - has consigned to popular legend the name of this castle, built between 1075 and 1090 during the reign of Roger II. In these very rooms, overlooking the Gulf of Carini, on the fourth of December 1563, Laura Lanza and her lover Ludovico Vernagallo.   

The construction of this castle began in 1316, by order of Count Francesco I of Ventimiglia, over the ruins of the ancient Byzantine town of Ypsigro, high on the San Pietro hill. Hence its original name, "Castello del buon aere" ("Castle of good air"), from which the name Castelbuono is derived - literally meaning "good castle". Numerous drastic alterations were made in the 17th cent. for reasons of accommodation.

As one proceeds along the road from Ragusa to Santa Croce Camerina, one can admire Donnafugata Castle, an imposing construction immersed in one of the most evocative carob woods in the whole province, the scene of famous films including an episode in "The Jar" in the film Kaos, directed by the Taviani brothers. The castle's origins date back to the mid-17th cent.

Since March 2003 Elio Vittorini (1908-1966) has been for Syracuse something more than the great writer who was born here. With the creation of the Literary Park named after this profound connoisseur of contemporary American literature, the writer has become an "ambassador", in the broadest sense of the word, for the cultural world of this province.

"...let the funerary urn be taken to Sicily and be walled into some rough stone in the country around Girgenti, where I was born." These were the testamentary instructions of Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936), who rests today close to the house he was born in and to what he called the "African sea". The house, in a country area known as Caos ("Chaos") in the territory of Agrigento and now transformed into a museum.

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