Our history
has ancient origins
"The King is the King, and no one could ask him to go down to facilitate the climbs"
It was the year 1933 and His Highness Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy, would not have imagined that in place of the Chiaramonte Gulfi station, 860 meters above sea level, the highest landing place of his royal voyage, seventy-four years later would be the first and only hotel in the Iblei Mountains was born, today Antica Stazione.
Surrounded by the "neviere", the ancient refrigerators in which the Chiaramontans deposited the snow, selling it and sending it, via the railway, to the nobles of the other counties, it was the narrow-gauge secondary line that connected Ragusa, Vizzini and Syracuse, in an unusual route to Y which allowed to furrow the necropolis of Pantalica and to connect the Hyblaean mountain centers with the rest of the State Railways network. The snow was loaded onto the wagons and sent to the barons whose villas were lapped by the railway and from these huts, snow deposits, from which to obtain the raw material, ice, for ancient slushes. Looking out from the windows of the Antica Stazione one seems to still see the “Ciccio Pecora train” climbing up the Iblei Mountains, forced to apologize to the passengers, who are occasionally forced to get off to make the climb less steep.
It was a short life, that of the private railway of the Anonymous Society for the Secondary Railways of Sicily, the Sasf: from 1922 to 49.
