The patron saint of Caronia is Saint Blaise, celebrated on 3 February, in the church dedicated to him in the main town. The municipality's other hamlets have their own patrons: the Madonna Annunziata for Marina di Caronia, and Saint John the Apostle for Canneto.
With its 226 square kilometres of surface area, the municipal territory of Caronia is the largest in the metropolitan city of Messina and the ninety-third largest in Italy, located halfway between Messina and Palermo. Recent archaeological excavations have shown that the Hellenistic town that stood on the site of today's Caronia was destroyed towards the end of the 1st century AD by a fire or an earthquake, perhaps prompting the inhabitants to move to the coast, where Caronia Marina now stands; shortly after the mid-4th century AD, the port settlement of Calacte, which had arisen there, was also destroyed, probably by another earthquake.
