Aci Catena

The name comes from the Madonna della Catena, whose sanctuary is the heart of the town, but before that it was called Scarpi, shoes, probably after the cobblers who worked here. Aci Catena is one of the Aci villages, born in the seventeenth century from the break-up of the old land of Aci, the land of the myth of Acis and Galatea, the shepherd boy turned into a river by the jealous Cyclops; what drove the separation was the growth of Acireale, which had made the other villages restless. Its own name in turn produced another: Catenanuova, in the province of Enna, was founded by a prince of the Catena.

On the eleventh of January 1693 the Val di Noto earthquake flattened eastern Sicily, and here it brought the church down; but the altar, the fifteenth-century icon and the statue were left intact, and the chronicles counted fewer than a hundred dead, far fewer than in the neighbouring towns. People took it for a miracle of the Madonna, who was said to have covered them with her mantle, and ever since the feast is repeated on the eleventh of every month; in December 1908 the parish priest wrote her a hymn of thanks entitled Ci salvò, she saved us, set to music within a few weeks. Churches, eighteenth-century palaces and courtyards of lava stone make up a town that lives in the shadow of Etna and that until 1828 also governed Aci Trezza: Acireale and the lemon riviera are a short step away.