The town sits on a plug of lava: a neck, the solidified conduit of a volcano extinct for five hundred and fifty thousand years, which erosion has cut back to a wall of hexagonal columns sixty-five metres high. Italy has only one other, Strombolicchio; here they call it the navel of Etna.
On top, between 1070 and 1074, Roger the Norman had a donjon built: twenty-one metres, twenty-one round-headed merlons, three floors linked by ladders that could be pulled up. It was there to watch the mouth of the plain of Catania; then, for four centuries, it served as a prison — in the ground-floor cistern the count of Modica, Bernardo Cabrera, was shut away. There are 11,394 residents.
Arancino · Pasta alla Norma
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Next up: Saint Anastasia, the Greek-Byzantine name joined to the Norman «Motta», Wednesday 25 August
Nearest airport: Catania Fontanarossa, 9 km away
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📅 Every year, on 25 August
Motta Sant'Anastasia celebrates Saint Anastasia on 25 August; the town's name joins the Norman term «Motta» to the Greek-Byzantine name «Anastasia», brought together between the 12th and 14th centuries when the townspeople united in devotion to the saint.
Saffron rice, ragù with peas and caciocavallo inside a golden cone-shaped crust: in Catania it is masculine and pointed, and the quarrel with Palermo over the name is serious.
Read more →Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
Outside Motta Sant'Anastasia, but an easy day trip away.
