Ceramics here go back to antiquity, and the trade was protected early: Alfonso of Aragon granted the town's craftsmen exemption from customs duties, which let Caltagirone ware circulate freely and sell across the Mediterranean. The pieces of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries decorated aristocratic houses and churches all over Sicily.

Almost none of that survives, and the reason is the ground. A serious earthquake struck in 1542 . Then, on 11 January 1693 , the Val di Noto earthquake destroyed the town — buildings, churches, and centuries of accumulated work.

What is remarkable is what the reconstruction chose to do. Rather than start over, Caltagirone kept its late-Renaissance plan: a crux viarum , the cross of streets formed vertically by the Scala di Santa Maria del Monte and horizontally by the streets of San Giorgio and San Giacomo — the same cross that appears on the civic arms. The Baroque town was built onto that skeleton, and it earned Caltagirone inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2002 , alongside Catania, Militello, Modica, Noto, Palazzolo Acreide, Ragusa and Scicli.

The stair itself was raised in the first decade of the seventeenth century — sources give 1606 or 1608 — to link the old upper town to the new lower one: 142 steps climbing some 130 metres of slope. Its famous ceramic risers are modern, laid from 1953–54 by the MAC cooperative, with designs running historically from the oldest styles at the bottom to the most recent at the top.

The ceramic revival that made those tiles possible is owed to Don Luigi Sturzo , the Caltagirone priest who was mayor of the town and later founded the Partito Popolare Italiano. He worked to restore the industry, and pushed for the Museo Regionale della Ceramica , whose collection was assembled from 1948 . From the early nineteenth century the town had also developed a distinct speciality in figurines — Giacomo Bongiovanni modelling the faces and gestures of ordinary Sicilians, peasants, shepherds, musicians, brigands, for the crib scenes still made here.