In his 1980 Viaggi e scritti letterari (Travels and Literary Writings), Cesare Brandi dedicates a chapter to Pantalica entitled “Quella fata Morgana chiamata Pantalica” (The Fata Morgana named Pantalica), in which he gives an evocative account of his journey through the Anapo valley, discovering a surreal and mysterious dimension in Pantalica’s incessant metamorphosis: “Of all these events, Pantalica is preserved like a skull: large empty dark circles under the eyes, formations of roughly sketched boulders, like a remnant of a royal palace.
The empty dark circles are the prehistoric tombs or perhaps later also dwellings […] This is Pantalica, a place to visit with nothing to see, to see with nothing to visit, but like a village found by crossing into a mirror, it is almost like a Fata Morgana that approached without suddenly disappearing”.
