Paternò

The comune of Paternò runs from the thirty-four metres of the Simeto plain to the two thousand eight hundred of the summit of Etna: its territory, that is, begins among the citrus groves and ends on the volcano. The town sits in the middle, inside the bowl of an extinct prehistoric volcano, where the Sicel village of Hybla Gereatis once stood. The Norman keep — the great tower Roger I raised in 1072 on the lava rock — has commanded the valley for almost a thousand years: from its terrace Etna fills the horizon as it does in few other places on the island.

In 1565 the Moncada made it a principality, and held it until 1812, when feudalism was abolished in Sicily. At the foot of the historic hill, with the mother church and Santa Maria dell'Alto, the town lives on citrus: its blood oranges go to markets across half of Europe, and there is hardly any woodland here, because the soil is too fertile to be left alone — six thousand hectares under cultivation. Water comes out where the permeable lava meets clay that lets nothing through, and there the springs are born. The salinelle — small cold mud volcanoes, a geological curiosity — are a reminder that the ground here is alive. Catania is twenty minutes away, the summit craters an hour by road and path.