Every design for Caltanissetta

Where else in Sicily can you look down on a valley that runs all the way to Enna? From Caltanissetta the Salso valley spreads out below, and the city sits deep in the interior of Sicily, among the Erei mountains and far from any coast, gathered in a natural hollow between three hills: Sant'Anna, Monte San Giuliano and Sant'Elia. It is one of the highest provincial capitals in Italy, second in Sicily only to Enna, and all around it the clay and limestone hills have been shaped and smoothed by erosion.

The Castello di Pietrarossa is the city's oldest landmark, a fortress often tied to its Arabic name, Qalʿat an-nisāʾ, the fortress of the women. Under the Moncada counts the city gained the Baroque Palazzo Moncada, and from the nineteenth century the sulphur beneath these hills made it the world's sulphur capital, with Italy's first mining institute founded here in 1862. The Museo Mineralogico keeps that story, and the Monumento al Redentore looks out over the rooftops. In the 1930s its cultural life led Leonardo Sciascia to call it a little Athens.

The mines have closed and the city now lives on services, but anyone who grew up here carries the hollow between the three hills, the old castle and the long valley below. This map holds every street of it.