The ground is old — Bronze Age settlement at Grotte Alte, and the Greek Syracusan colony of Kamarina on the coast nearby — but the town is not.

Vittoria Colonna Henriquez-Cabrera was left in difficulty by the death of her husband, Luigi Enríquez de Cabrera , Almirante of Castile, duke of Medina de Rioseco and Count of Modica. To restore her patrimony she petitioned Philip III of Spain for a concession to found a new settlement. The site chosen was Boscopiano — the flat wood — on the right bank of the Ippari valley, in the plain between the Ippari and the Dirillo, near the remains of Kamarina. The royal diploma granted on 24 April 1607 put it in those terms: Riedificetur Camarina , let Kamarina be rebuilt.

The new town took its founder's name. Work on the castle began on 4 March 1607 , and with the noble residence went the granaries for the Court's grain, the first church of San Giovanni Battista , and two mills. Castle and mother church were set as the two perspectival poles of the plan, and the streets were laid out on a grid — the ordinary shape of a planned foundation, and the reason Vittoria looks nothing like the tangled hill towns around it.

The countess recruited her population from the comuni of the county. The patron, San Giovanni Battista , is attributed to the Vizzinesi who formed the main settling group. The land was extremely fertile, and the town grew fast on it, drawing people from the surrounding towns, from elsewhere in Sicily, from Calabria and from Malta.

The 1693 earthquake is the one point where the sources genuinely disagree: some say it partly destroyed the young town, others that Vittoria suffered comparatively little. What is not in doubt is that the rebuilding — aided by flat ground — continued the grid, with wide, straight, symmetrical streets, and produced the mother church as rebuilt between 1695 and 1706 , which holds the founder's tomb.

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought money and buildings: the church of the Madonna delle Grazie , rebuilt in 1754 with a tower facade and polychrome marble altars of 1771 ; the neoclassical Teatro Comunale beside it, built 1869–77 , its front crowned with statues of Apollo and Diana; and a substantial body of Liberty architecture, with the influence of the Palermo architect Ernesto Basile.

One twentieth-century episode is worth recording. In 1916 Vittoria housed a prisoner-of-war camp holding some twenty thousand soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army.