Among the most important monuments of Pachino, much to be stylized in the heraldic coat of arms of the city, the Scibini tower (or Xibini, because in the past the imperfect writing of the terms beginning with the letters S and C, often traced too close to each other, gave rise to the error of transcription in X) lying forgotten on the edge of a trazzera campaign, a couple of kilometers from the town. Torre Scibini, which suffered copious damage due to the earthquake that razed the Noto in 1693, was timidly but effectively renovated only in 1994 by the Superintendency of Syracuse. Since then, its best exploitation has been achieved by caper plants which flourish at its base ...

Acquired in 1395, during the Spanish domination of Sicily, by the baron Mainitto Xurtino (or Sortino) of Palazzolo (Acreide), the fiefdom Scibini was characterized by a particularly fertile hill territory. The tower was built by its descendant Antonino in 1494 (or 1493) in order to supervise the cultivation of the fief to prevent thefts and raids by local rural communities. Before the recent study by Salvatore Cultrera and Guido Rabito, widespread opinion was that Torre Scibini was part of the system of watch towers to defend the coast of south-eastern Sicily from the raids of Barbary pirates (Maghreb). However, even through empirical evidence, it was clear that Torre Scibini was in a poor vantage point of the coast (unlike, for example, the nearby Torre Fano): from the highest point of the tower you can only see a small portion of the Morghella beach.

Torre Scibini, with a square base, is about ten meters high. The ground floor, which could only be entered from the upper floor (ie the Gurdian housing), probably served as galley. The tower could only be accessed from the outside, by a wooden staircase that was then withdrawn inside. On the main façade of the tower is the emblem of the family Xurtino (a shield and three slanted bars, framed by a rhomboidal bas-relief) and an inscription in Latin. The inscription was damaged, as well as by the physiological wear and tear of the weather and the bad weather, also by the shootings of the hunters who in the IXX and in the XX century used it as a target ... Blissful ignorance! To complicate the translation there are also the typical abbreviations of the period, which involved, for Cultrera and Rabito, a non-simple comparison with tombstones of the same period. The work of Cultrera and Rabito also refutes the consolidated opinion that this inscription was a tender to hire militias because, not only, there is no clear trace in the text (which would simply describe the reason for the construction of the tower), but above all because, more than ten meters high, it would have been impossible to read. I would also like to add a personal reflection: in an era characterized by a very low popular schooling, especially in a rural area, where the stone inscriptions were handcrafted and laboriously done with hammer and chisel, what sense would had an enrollment notice enforced (therefore temporally determined), among other things in classical Latin? For completeness of information, please also mention the radically different opinion on the genesis of the tower and the discordant translation of the inscription by by Giuseppe Mario Lucchese.

Around the tower, which is therefore very likely that it was never a military garrison, nor a sighting and signaling of the Saracen raids, there were stalls and tenements (of which there are few traces left) to the dwelling of the farmers who worked the fields of the Scibini fiefdom. Given the discovery less than a hundred meters from the tower of a Arabian-style aqueduct, it is not possible to exclude the pre-existence on site of a similar Arab structure and the hypothesis that Torre Scibini had been built on the its ruins. In 1563 the baron Francesco Starrabba of Piazza (Armerina), ancestor of the founding Starrabba of Pachino in 1760, marrying Ippolita Sortino (heir of the Xurtino family), acquired the fiefdom Scibini, thus binding inextricably the history of the tower to the history of Pachino.