Portale di San Giorgio

One carved doorway is all that is left of Ragusa's medieval mother church. The Portale di San Giorgio, a Gothic-Catalan arch of worked limestone by the gardens of Ibla, outlived the 1693 earthquake that levelled the church around it, and it remains the city's rarest kind of monument: a piece of the Middle Ages inside a baroque town.

Why it matters

Ragusa Ibla is famous as a baroque quarter, yet almost everything visitors see was rebuilt after the catastrophe of 1693. This portal is the exception that proves the rule. An educational platform of the UNESCO sites of Sicily describes it as the side portal of the ancient mother church of San Giorgio, saved from the earthquake and still to be admired near the Giardini Iblei, and it has become one of the symbols of the city. For a traveller, that makes the monument a hinge: stand before it and you see, in a single frame, the late-medieval Ragusa of counts and knightly patrons on one side, and the rebuilt baroque town crowned by the Duomo di San Giorgio on the other.

What to notice

Read the arch from the ground up. The whole structure is cut from dressed limestone with a pale pink cast, framed by fluted pilasters; the opening splays outward in the deep jambs typical of the period, and the arch above runs through moulded orders. In the lunette over the lintel, a relief shows Saint George on horseback dispatching the dragon — the patron's legend in miniature — while lozenge panels higher up carry the eagle of Ragusa, the city's heraldic bird. Little figures, flowers and leaves fill the spaces between the mouldings, the kind of late-Gothic ornament that survived in Sicily under Catalan influence. The portal stands on Via dei Normanni near the Giardino Ibleo and the church of San Vincenzo Ferreri.

Context and history

The portal belonged to the matrix church of San Giorgio, the spiritual head of Ragusa through the Middle Ages. That church had deep roots: it was enlarged in the late 11th century by Count Geoffrey, a son of Roger I, and it passed through the patronage of the Chiaramonte family from 1308 and then the Cabrera counts after 1382, who undertook major rebuilding; a 16th-century reconstruction followed, and it was under Urban VIII in the 17th century that Saint George was formally confirmed as the city's patron. The earthquake of 1693 crippled the building, and in 1718 what remained was demolished. Of the whole complex only this portal held firm. Its furnishings had a partial afterlife — vestiges of the old church, including a 16th-century altar by Antonello Gagini, are preserved in the cathedral museum next to the later Duomo, which took over the mother church's role in the rebuilt quarter.