Giarre

Giarre has become famous for what it never finished: the public works begun in the nineteen-nineties and never brought into use, so much so that the town is regarded as the capital of the unfinished. Some have found a second trade, and one has even become a multi-storey car park; there are those who see in them a tourist attraction. The name comes from Arabic and means earthenware jars; the town was born in the sixteenth century inside the county of Mascali, and it grew when the Val di Noto earthquake forced the old consular road down to the valley, making it the obligatory stop between Catania and Messina. Independence from Mascali came only in 1815, and the seven towers on its arms come from there, from the county that had held it.

The neoclassical cathedral, raised from the end of the eighteenth century in the white stone of Comiso, is dedicated to saint Isidore the Farmer, patron of Madrid, and holds a Serassi organ among the largest in Sicily; at Santa Maria la Strada the well of Roger I, dating from 1081, is still there. The twentieth century took away and gave back even its name, for under fascism it was merged with Riposto and renamed Ionia, and only after the war did it become Giarre again; and inside its territory there is still an enclave, the hamlet of Tagliaborse, which belongs to Mascali. What brought the town into national history, though, happened on the thirty-first of October 1980: two young men whom everybody in town knew and called i ziti, the sweethearts, were found dead hand in hand. Italy had to recognise that a problem of discrimination existed, and a month later, in Palermo, the first Arci branch for homosexuals was founded.