Gravina di Catania

The old name, Plachi, comes from the Greek Piakos, open countryside, and it is the name under which Diodorus Siculus recorded a Sicel village strong enough to push Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, to make war on it in 404 BC. The Syracusans won and destroyed the settlement, which was reborn soon after, repopulated by refugees from Naxos and Katane, themselves just razed by the same Syracuse. The name lasted for centuries, until, in the seventeenth century, the fief passed to prince Girolamo Gravina: in 1647 he was granted by privilege the right to rename it after his own surname, and Plachi became a principality under the name Gravina. The town was later damaged by the eruption of Etna in 1669; and only after Italian unification, to avoid confusion with the town of the same name Gravina in Puglia, did it take its current form, Gravina di Catania. In dialect, though, many still say Prachi, and its people pracaloti.

For three centuries it stayed a small farming town: in 1817 it counted little more than a thousand people, and even by the mid-twentieth century it had fewer than three thousand. Then, from the nineteen-sixties, an unprecedented wave of migration, above all from Catania, turned the districts of Fasano and San Paolo into crowded outlying neighbourhoods, and today Gravina di Catania is the second most densely populated town in all of Sicily. On the southern slopes of Etna, the town has paid the price of standing so close to the volcano: in 1381 a crater opened right in one of its districts, and the lava reached as far as the Catanian hamlet of Ognina.