Belpasso

The town has been destroyed and rebuilt three times, and each time it changed its name. It was called Santa Maria del Passo as early as 1305, then became Malupassu, because bandits used to lie in wait for travellers around here; some think the name instead comes from the Spanish malpaís, the barren land covered in black lava also found in the Canary Islands, which passed into English as badland. The 1669 lava flow really did bury it, and the survivors rebuilt it elsewhere under the name Fenicia Moncada, from the Arabian phoenix and the Moncada family, princes of Paternò and lords of the fief; the 1693 earthquake forced them to start again a third time, still further north, in a place first called Stella Aragona. It was the Bufali family who finally gave it the auspicious name of Belpasso, turning the old Malpasso, bad pass, into a good one; yet neighbouring communities still call its people malupassota.

The coat of arms bears precisely the Arabian phoenix, with the motto Melior de cinere surgo, I rise better from the ashes. Near Valcorrente, where Fenicia Moncada once stood, little remains of that second settlement, but excavations have brought to light the outline and apse of a fourth-century church. In the cathedral, from Palm Sunday to Easter, the townspeople unroll the Tila, a Crucifixion fifteen by ten metres painted in 1896 by Zenone Lavagna and left unfinished; the bell is the sixth largest in Italy.