Mileto

For a century Mileto was a capital. Roger I of Hauteville held his court here, and here in 1095 his son Roger II was born, who would become the first king of Sicily; the father died in the town in 1101. It was Roger I too who obtained from pope Gregory VII the foundation of the bishopric, and the see of Mileto was the first Latin-rite diocese of southern Italy, in a land where the Greek-Byzantine rite had by then replaced the Roman one. As for the name, tradition derives it from Greek refugees from Miletus in Asia, but it more probably comes from the Latin maletum, an apple orchard: Malita in Cicero, Melitum in the chronicler Malaterra, then Miletum.

The earthquake of 1783 levelled the ancient city, which is still there, reduced to a field of ruins; the new Mileto was rebuilt two kilometres further west, in a place called Villa del vescovo. The history of the Kingdom passed through here twice: in 1799 cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo gathered his army of the Holy Faith here to put Ferdinand IV back on the throne, and on 27 August 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi stopped here on his way to bring that Kingdom to an end. On 16 July 1943 American aircraft attacked the town and thirty-nine civilians died, mostly women and children: the bronze medal for civil valour was awarded sixty-five years later, on the same day of the year.