Realmonte

Realmonte sits on the southern Sicilian coast ten kilometres west of Agrigento, on a marl headland above the Mediterranean. The town's founding probably goes back to the second half of the seventeenth century; what makes it visible on a map of Sicily is older. The Scala dei Turchi, the white marl cliff a kilometre west of the centre, is formed of Trubi Formation rock laid down five million years ago when the Mediterranean refilled after the Messinian salinity crisis.

Its name remembers the sixteenth-century pirate raids that used the cliff as a landing point. Andrea Camilleri's Montalbano novels and Giuseppe Tornatore's Malèna both took it for backdrop. Inland, the Realmonte salt mine runs twenty-five kilometres of tunnels a hundred metres underground, with a chapel hollowed from the salt that holds eight hundred people.

A Roman villa with marble and mosaic floors was uncovered above Punta Piccola in 1907 during railway works. The commune holds two institutional signals: Borgo dei Borghi finalist and Città dell'Olio.