The patron saint of Pietraperzia is Saint Roch, celebrated on 16 August. The church dedicated to him was named after the saint after 1624, when, gripped by famine and plague, the population turned to him and received his grace: Saint Roch was then proclaimed patron of Pietraperzia, in place of Saint Nicholas of Bari. Inside can be admired a painting of the Immaculate Conception with Saint Roch and Saint Sebastian, by an unknown author, and several wooden statues, including one of Saint Roch himself.
For the town's history and development the Normans were important, led by the noble Barresi family: it was Abbo Barresi, the family's founding ancestor, who built the Norman castle of Pietraperzia, of which ruins remain today on the town's highest, most scenic point, built on a limestone crag dating from 50-60 million years ago. In 1523 the sculptor Antonello Gagini made for the Barresi family the marble sarcophagi held in the mother church of Santa Maria Maggiore, a 16th-century Latin-cross building built on the site of an earlier Norman church torn down in 1530 by Matteo Barresi, marquis of Pietraperzia, whose construction was never completed: in the left nave lies the sarcophagus of Dorotea Barresi, while two others hold the remains of Pietro Barresi and his wife Laura.
