A wonderful landscape:
the "dry-stone wall" and the "carob tree"

Only the Hyblaean land and no other place in the world offers so lofty a frame, which repeats itself endlessly among the plateaux, the hills and the pastures. This frame , which is unique in the world, is the DRY-STONE WALL, the patient result of peasant’s work and of callous hands laying the foundations of these walls, stone after stone. They were and they are still the splendid decorations of the Hyblaean country, the only natural enclosures of fields, which follow the sloping down valleys and the local peculiarity of the land; they are present in fields under cultivation, around carob trees and olive trees. If a tourist, on a country road, sees one of these walls, he inevitably stops at the side of the road to admire the stones which compose it. These stones, extracted from the tender limestone, tells centuries of history.

The most typical Hyblaean landscape is made up of a carob tree or a millenary olive tree surrounded by small dry-stone walls. But we can also find a classic carob wood near a farm. Here, dry-stone walls are no more used as enclosures but as impregnable protection. The "long lived" stone which enclosed so many farms in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, had the function to fortify built up rural areas. These walls are even twelve feet high, because they also acted as a protection for the farmers to keep wolves away.

The carob tree

According to Hoofer, the Lotus mentioned by Homer, which peoples of the African coast and the first inhabitants of Sicily used to eat, was nothing but carob. For the great Greek poet carobs were the most precious food for Lotus Eaters which used to eat only rough acorns. Clemente Grimaldi in 1895, in its treaty on carob tree wrote: " I wonder if those countless square cavities, dug by the man’s hand on the sides of hard rocks, in the long valley of Ispica, between Spaccaforno and Modica, are the signs of a primitive settlement chosen for the advantage offered by so abundant and prosperous a tree present in that area."

But apart from literary and legendary influences the carob tree has been thriving in the Hyblaean area, like in African countries; it is a kind of vegetation that grows very well in calcareous and volcanic lands. The carob tree, which the botanists call "ceratonia siliqua" was called "ceration" by the Greeks and "siliqua" by the Latin people, which means pod. In Sicily it was usually called "carrua", up to the present term "Carrubo", indicating with the same name both the fruit and the tree. This tree is the natural element which completes the Hyblaean country ; its fruit is used to produce saccharose , fodder and syrups. From the seeds we obtain a very good flour, used in different ways, to produce preservatives and in the tan industry. Industrious bees carry the pollen from flower to flower: a continuous work that produces the precious carob honey.

CROSSING of a dry-stone wall	MODICAN WALL	RAGUSAN WALL