From the chronicles and descriptions written after the quake, we get the idea of an appalling disaster, almost “an image of the Last Judgement” which was interpreted by contemporaries as supreme punishment for the sins of mankind. “Memorare terremotu et non peccabis” we read in one of the diocese documents after January 1693, a warning for the entire population that was invited to contribute with private sums to the reconstruction. The Spanish government and the aristocracy did their part too and the rebirth could be described as the result of a team effort, a sense of society and of community.
The Val di Noto became the biggest building site in history and an international laboratory of Baroque models, which reached its greatest heights in the extraordinary final flowering. However, not all of the 50-60 cities, small and large, damaged or devastated, saw a reconstruction due entirely to the actual damage done. There is enough evidence in the archives to be able to state that there is not always a close correspondence between the declared, real damage and the vastness of the reconstruction undertaken; often the disaster was transformed into a possibility for development, thanks to the actions of the ruling classes of the time.
The real protagonists of the rebuilding, the farsighted architects, engineers, master-builders and craftsmen, Gagliardi and Vaccarini, Palma, Picherali and Battaglia, Ittar and Vasta, the Alì and Cultraro families and many more, left their mark on the architecture which is characterised by a strong sense of movement and space, which refers back to Roman and international Baroque, but which at the same time demonstrates an exceptional decorative richness which produces joy and wonder in the spectator. “The aim of the poet is Wonderment” wrote Giovan Battista Marino, great poet of the 17th century. The artifices and caprices of the Baroque are the signs of a culture where apotropaic symbolism and allegory refer back to ancient names and to the symbol that identifies Sicily: the Gorgon.