Mascalucia

Spread over the southern slopes of Etna, six kilometres from Catania, Mascalucia was until the early nineteen-seventies a quiet holiday village and a farming junction, and then absorbed in a few decades all the growth of the Catania hinterland. The name may come from mascalcia, the farrier's trade: here, historians say, lay the royal lands where horses were bred and shod. Another theory traced it to a village given by Constantine to the pope, but that donation was shown to be a forgery by Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century. The founding legend speaks instead of the Ombri, a people driven out of the mainland: their name survives in the district still called Ombra.

With the volcano that fills its horizon the account is still open. In 1669 the lava flow buried the village, and those who fled to Catania were given a piece of ground by the city senate to settle on: together with refugees from Misterbianco they founded there the quarter called the Borgo, which is still standing. Those who returned rebuilt, and twenty-four years later the Val di Noto earthquake took fifty-three lives from them. In the lava of Mompilieri stands the sanctuary of the Madonna della Sciara, a place of pilgrimage from all over Sicily, and inside the cemetery the temple of Sant'Antonio Abate, older than the Arab conquest, which in the Middle Ages belonged to the knights of Jerusalem. The village was also sold at auction, under Spanish rule, to a banker; and its carbonari, who had called themselves the Lodge of the Free Ombri after the founders, raised the tricolour on the bell tower of the mother church.