The Gaetano Savasta civic museum, named after the local historian Monsignor Gaetano Savasta, has two sites: the former Bourbon prison on piazza Martiri d'Ungheria, right in the old centre of Paternò, and the former municipal slaughterhouse, in the Falconieri area.
What to see
The former prison was built in the early nineteenth century, under the Bourbons, for prisoners serving short sentences for minor offences, and remained in use until the first years after the war; from 1997 to 2001 it housed the municipal library, after a collapse in the former monastery of the Santissima Annunziata. On 8 December 2007 the archaeological section opened here, with amphorae, sherds and plates of Roman and medieval date found in excavations between 1993 and 1998 on the hill of Paternò and in the districts of Poggio Monaco, San Marco, Poggio Cocola and Monte Castellaccio. The building is rectangular, with a large round-arched portal framed in lava stone and two segmental-arched windows at its sides.
The slaughterhouse was built after 1835, when the town council banned the slaughter of animals in public squares, and worked until the seventies of the twentieth century. Restored from 2005, in 2009 it opened as the museum of rural crafts, now the ethno-anthropological section of the civic museum, with the tools and implements of old craft and farming trades.
Visiting
Opening times and tickets for the two sections should be checked with the municipality.
Our editors' tip
Look at the windows of the archaeological section: they all still have the iron bars of the old prison.
