There is a cluster of Baroque towns in this part of Sicily. Several of them contribute to the creation of the fictional town in which one of our favourite programs- Commissario Montalbano- is set. For the first time our ideals took a beating due to our being well and truly in the off season, because we had tried to book a day trip from Siracusa that included several of the key sites. We were advised there was no tour at this time, so decided we would visit Ragusa Ibla, as much for its own charm as any link to TV.

It would be fair to say that today didn't, receive the usual Bezzina forensic planning process, and it showed.

Transport isn't frequent. We decided on a train that left at 11 and got us into Ragusa Superiore about 1. Mistake 1- by then the Duomo was already shut for the afternoon. As was almost everything in town!

Mistake 2- it was a 43 minute walk from Ragusa to Ragusa Ibla- although it was, once we cleared the main road with no shoulder, quite lovely.

Mistake 3 - once we had appreciated mistakes 1 and 2 we decided we'd just flag down a cab. (Didn't see one the whole way!)

Mistake 4- the late arrival and limited return trains meant we were a bit squeezed for time.

Mistake 5: Using Google Maps drains the phone battery like nobody's business, and I hadn't packed a power pack for this trip, so just abandoning ourselves to the pretty lanes and by-ways to rely on Google to get us back wasn't on.

OK then.... was there anything worthwhile?

Yes - all the mistakes were great learning for us.

And -

1. The little one carriage rail motor that made the trip under the burden of several coats of graffiti was one for the album. Battered about, of more than a certain age, it took us through some gorgeous countryside, of quite a different nature to what we have seen to date.

2. The walk down the steep path from Ragusa Superiore to Ragusa Ibla was a great way to enter the latter with glimpses of its baroque buildings - at first through the trees, and then from the narrow alleyways that led us to the (closed) Cathedral.

3. For the first time in six weeks we experienced genuine calm and silence. When I say that Ragusa Ibla was shut ,it was double shut. Anything that wasn't shut for siesta was shut for the off season. We just sat at the only cafe we could find for our lunch and listened to the silence, then repeated the experience in the lovely Garden of Ibla as we gazed over the surrounding hillside. This garden is probably the best maintained public space we have seen in Italy.

Our next challenge was to get back to the station. We didn't fancy that stretch of road where cars whizzed past about 30cm from you, so we had to work out how to charm a taxi to us. Clearly waiting for one to come by was futile. The two places we had seen that looked like taxi ranks had lots of phone numbers for taxi companies but no taxis. I had been hoarding battery power, now in the red, and was a bit unsure about how to book the cab, but we were standing at what I assume was a rank outside the gardens and I'd just begun to think about dialling when Anne spotted a cab, which, miracle of miracles was free. He didn't start the meter, but we discovered that there was a fixed price in the Ragusa area. This all happened so quickly that we ended up being very early at the station, and simply settled down to wait after a short walk during which we saw a major intersection that had clearly been built by the Fascists judging from the architecture.

All we needed to do for dinner was buy a couple of items from the mobile deli at our front door, and use the bread I had bought this morning. Day done!