The patron saint of Pagliara is Saint Sebastian, celebrated on 20 January in the church dedicated to him; the town also preserves the mother church of Santi Pietro e Paolo, whose architecture attests to the town's rise and prosperity during the 17th century.
Pagliara, along with the nearby village of Locadi, became one of the hamlets of the barony of Savoca: already in the 16th century it was a fairly developed centre, so much so that historian Rocco Pirri, in his volume Sicilia Sacra, called it a «Casale Tuguriorum», that is, in the language of the time, a modest rural centre with closely packed dwellings, home to an average of sixty families recorded together with those of Savoca. In the hamlet of Locadi, an independent municipality until 1928 and later a hamlet of Furci Siculo until 1938, the mother church of San Giovanni and the 16th-century Torre Sollima still stand, along with late-17th-century ruins and old water mills in the surrounding countryside.
