Gizzeria

The town stands at 630 metres, clinging to the slopes of the valley of the Casale stream, and from up there you can see the Aeolian islands. Its coast, however, is the strangest part: ten kilometres of shore that they call the mouth of the wind, because the shape of the land funnels the wind exactly there, into the isthmus. On that wind one of the largest wind farms in Italy has been built, and thanks to that same wind Gizzeria has become one of the best places in the Mediterranean for kitesurfing: every year it hosts a stage of the European championship, and in 2015 it hosted a stage of the world one. The name comes from the Greek city of Issaros, and according to some scholars the roots of the town lie in a Greek colony called Izzario, later absorbed by the Basilian monastery of San Nicola and latinised in the eleventh century by the Benedictines of Sant'Eufemia; in Norman times, under the name of Yussaria, it was a castrum of Robert Guiscard.

The recognised foundation of the settlement, however, is of about 1450, and it was probably the work of Albanian colonists, arbëreshë, who had escaped the Turkish destruction and arrived here in successive waves. But the town was soon assigned to the fief of Santa Eufemia, governed by the Knights of Malta, who latinised it: the inhabitants abandoned the Albanian language and the Orthodox rite, and today almost nothing of those traditions remains — while in the municipal coat of arms, beside saint John the Baptist, there is still a Maltese cross. After feudalism was abolished a local middle class grew up that people called the galantomini, and many townsmen took part in the liberal risings: among them Alessandro Toja, who was one of the Thousand. Towards the end of the nineteenth century poverty and a growing population set off a heavy emigration, which has never stopped: some of the Italian emigrants who died in the Monongah mining disaster, the worst in the history of the United States, on 6 December 1907, came from Gizzeria.