Not far from Palermo, among the bright colours of the citrus groves and the intense blue of the sea is Carini, a place well-known for the extraordinary fertility of its land, for plentiful water and the variety of its fruit. Founded on the remains of a previous tenth-century Arabian settlement, the town has a chequer board plan, culminating in the magnificent castle perhaps dating from the Norman period. The castle, belonging to the Chiaramonte, Moncada and La Grua families, was rebuilt and transformed into an aristocratic residence in the sixteenth century. Its fame is above all linked to the celebrated and unhappy affair of the Baroness di Carini, narrated in a popular poem in Sicilian dialect, killed on the orders of her father in 1563, because of her unfaithfulness. Inside the castle, with its many Catalan-Renaissance features, the great hall decorated with a fine fifteenth-century wooden ceiling, should be seen. The lovely town also has an imposing mother church, consecrated to Our Lady of the Assumption, with a late eighteenth-century facade, crowned with two tall bell towers, and with a spacious loggia at its side. The interior of the church, with three naves, is decorated with fine stucco work and neo-classical frescoes. It contains a magnificent Adoration of the shepherds, a sixteenth-century work by Alessandro Allori. Finally, the oratory of the Company of the Holy Sacrament is worthy of note, containing splendid eighteenth-century stucco work by the Serpotta school and on the vault, frescoes by Giuseppe Velasco.