Pianura
Discover what to see in Acate, the former Biscari in Ragusa province: Baroque history, Cerasuolo di Vittoria vineyards, castle and Iblean landscapes.
Until 1938, the town now known as Acate appeared on every official map under a different name: Biscari. That administrative rename, imposed during the Fascist-era campaign to Italianise place names, erased a toponym that had identified this settlement in the Ragusa province of southeastern Sicily for centuries. Today, with a population of around 10,678, Acate sits in the lower Iblean plateau, embedded in a landscape of wheat fields, carob groves and vineyards. Knowing what to see in Acate means understanding this layered past — a town that carries two names and several centuries of Norman, Spanish and Bourbon ambition within its streets.
The original name Biscari derives from the Arab toponym Biqsir, a linguistic trace of the period of Arab settlement and agricultural reorganisation that transformed much of southeastern Sicily between the 9th and 11th centuries. When the Normans consolidated their grip on the island following the conquest of 1072, the territory around Biscari was absorbed into the feudal grid that Roger I and his successors imposed across Sicily. The town’s position on the edge of the Iblean plateau, close to the Dirillo River, made it a strategically useful settlement for controlling routes between the interior and the southern coastline.
The Branciforte family, one of the most powerful aristocratic dynasties in early modern Sicily, held the fief of Biscari for an extended period before the title passed to the Paternò Castello family, who became Princes of Biscari. It was under this lineage that the town saw significant architectural and cultural investment during the 17th and 18th centuries. The Princes of Biscari were notable patrons — Ignazio Paternò Castello, the 5th Prince of Biscari, built a celebrated private museum in Catania that assembled Greek, Roman and Sicilian antiquities and became a reference point for Enlightenment-era scholarship across Europe.
The catastrophic earthquake of 1693, which devastated much of southeastern Sicily and levelled cities such as Noto and Ragusa, struck Biscari as well. The reconstruction that followed gave the town much of its current Baroque architectural character — the same wave of rebuilding that reshaped the entire Val di Noto. In 1938, the Fascist government renamed the municipality Acate, adopting the name of the Acate River (the ancient Greek Akagas in its minor course). This change severed the town’s official identity from its Arab-Norman heritage, though local memory preserved the older name well into the postwar decades.
The feudal castle associated with the Princes of Biscari stands as the most architecturally significant structure in the town centre. Built and modified over several centuries, its current form reflects late medieval and early modern interventions. The structure served as the administrative and residential seat of the Paternò Castello family during their long tenure as feudal lords of the territory.
The main parish church, dedicated to Saint Nicholas of Bari, was rebuilt following the 1693 earthquake in the Baroque style that defines religious architecture across the Val di Noto. Its façade and interior organisation follow the post-earthquake reconstruction typology common to this corner of Sicily, with a nave layout typical of 18th-century Sicilian ecclesiastical building.
The grid of streets around the central piazza preserves the urban layout established during the post-1693 reconstruction. Low-rise stone buildings in local limestone line the main corso, and the proportions of the squares reflect the planned character of 18th-century Sicilian town design — rational, measured, and oriented around the church and municipal palazzo.
The Dirillo River, which marks part of the territorial boundary of the municipality, runs through a valley of agricultural and ecological interest. The river corridor supports a mosaic of riparian vegetation, citrus cultivation and cereal farming. The landscape here gives a direct reading of the productive geography that made the Biscari fief economically viable under feudal administration.
The countryside around Acate contains some of the most intact examples of traditional Iblean agricultural landscape in the Ragusa province. Carob trees — a crop with documented commercial importance in Sicily since at least the medieval period — alternate with vineyards producing grapes destined for the Cerasuolo di Vittoria DOCG, the only DOCG designation in Sicily.
The Ragusa province is one of the most productive agricultural zones in Sicily, and Acate sits within this broader food geography. The vineyards surrounding the town contribute to the Cerasuolo di Vittoria DOCG, a red wine produced from a blend of Nero d’Avola and Frappato grapes — two varieties indigenous to southeastern Sicily. The wine carries a designation of controlled and guaranteed origin, making it the benchmark product of this territory. Local trattorias and agriturismi in the area typically serve it alongside dishes built on the same agricultural logic: pasta with ragù of local pork, grilled lamb from the Iblean uplands, and ricotta made from sheep’s milk grazed on the plateau.
Alongside wine, the area produces Ragusano DOP cheese — a stretched-curd cheese made exclusively from the milk of the Modicana cattle breed, aged in forms that are traditionally tied with rope and hung to mature. Its flavour shifts from mild and milky when young to sharp and granular after extended ageing. Carob flour, olive oil from the low-altitude groves, and wild fennel feature consistently in local cooking. For those looking to eat well in or near Acate, the network of agriturismi in the surrounding countryside offers the most direct access to this produce, often serving food grown or raised on the same property. The official municipal website of Acate provides updated listings of local businesses and producers.
Southeastern Sicily operates on a climate pattern of hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. July and August bring temperatures that regularly exceed 35°C in the interior, making long walks through the town or the countryside uncomfortable during midday hours. The better windows for a visit are late spring — particularly May and early June, when the wheat is still green and the carob trees are in leaf — and autumn, from late September through November, when the grape harvest is underway and the light over the Iblean plateau is direct and clear. The Cerasuolo di Vittoria harvest period in September and October gives visitors the chance to observe the agricultural cycle that drives the local economy at its most active point.
Easter week in this part of Sicily carries significant religious observance, with processions and liturgical ceremonies that draw participants from across the province. For those interested in the Baroque architectural heritage of the Val di Noto more broadly, coordinating a visit to Acate with explorations of the nearby UNESCO-listed towns — Ragusa, Modica, Scicli — makes practical sense, as the distances between them are short and the road network is good. Winters are quiet and some businesses operate reduced hours, but the town functions normally and accommodation is easier to find without advance booking.
Acate is located in the Ragusa province of southeastern Sicily. The nearest major airport is Catania-Fontanarossa (Vincenzo Bellini International Airport), approximately 90 kilometres to the northeast, making it the primary point of entry for most visitors travelling from outside Sicily. From Catania, the most direct road route follows the SS514 and SP connections towards the Ragusa province, with a driving time of roughly 75 to 90 minutes depending on traffic through the Iblean hills. Palermo Airport is a secondary option, approximately 250 kilometres away via the A19 motorway.
Acate is a working agricultural town rather than a tourism hub, which means accommodation within the town centre itself is limited — expect a small number of B&Bs and guesthouses rather than hotels. The most practical and characteristic lodging option in this territory is the agriturismo: farm-stay properties scattered across the surrounding countryside that offer rooms and often meals prepared from their own produce. These range from simple working farms with basic rooms to more carefully restored masserie — the large stone farmhouses typical of the Ragusa plateau — with higher levels of comfort. Booking directly with the property is common practice in this area, and many agriturismi maintain their own websites or profiles on standard booking platforms.
For visitors who want a broader base from which to explore the Val di Noto, the city of Ragusa — the provincial capital, roughly 30 kilometres away — offers a wider selection of hotels, B&Bs and apartment rentals across its two distinct urban levels of Ragusa Superiore and Ragusa Ibla. This can be a practical choice for those combining Acate with visits to Modica, Scicli or Vittoria. The Sicilian Regional Tourism portal maintains searchable accommodation listings by municipality and territory.
The Ragusa province is one of several distinct regional pockets in Sicily where history, landscape and food converge in ways that reward careful, slow exploration. Visitors extending their journey westward might consider Salaparuta, a village in the Belice Valley that carries its own layered history of reconstruction following the 1968 earthquake — a different chapter in Sicily’s long relationship with seismic rupture and urban reinvention. To the northeast, the provincial city of Catania offers the volcanic drama of Etna as a backdrop and the full architectural register of Baroque urban planning at a larger scale, with the added interest of the 5th Prince of Biscari’s celebrated antiquities museum.
Moving into the interior highlands, Godrano, in the Palermo hinterland, represents a quieter face of inland Sicily — a small community embedded in a forested landscape that contrasts sharply with the open cereal plains of the Ragusa province. Further north, Caltanissetta serves as the administrative centre of the island’s geographical core, with a Baroque cathedral and a mining heritage rooted in the sulphur extraction industry that defined this part of Sicily’s economy for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Together, these destinations map a cross-section of Sicilian territory that no single town can represent alone. For a comprehensive regional overview, the Visit Sicily official tourism portal offers itinerary planning tools and event calendars across all nine provinces.
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