This village emptied out between the post-war years and the nineteen-sixties, and since 2009 it has been listed in the Sicilian Region's register of intangible heritage. Not among the monuments: in the book of crafts, knowledge and techniques. An abandoned village protected not for its stones but for what its people knew how to do.
What to see
Pantano clings to a ridge of the Peloritani mountains, in hill country that today falls within an ecological corridor. The houses are the ones the inhabitants left when they went down to the valley or away altogether: a process that began after the war and was over within some fifteen years.
The oldest written record concerning it is a notarial act by which the Latin nuns of the diocese of Messina ceded a plot to a local man, Antonio Calabro, against a rent of three gold tarì. These are the documents from which the life of villages like this is reconstructed: land contracts, not chronicles.
Visiting
You come from Rometta following the provincial road towards the mountains and then a turning; it is an abandoned settlement, so there are no services, and the ruins should not be explored from inside. An hour.
Our editors' tip
Look at the terraces and the paths rather than at the houses. If this place is protected as knowledge and not as architecture, the reason is visible outside the walls: in the way the slope was cut into steps, in the channelled water, in the routes that linked the families to the fields. The technique is in the landscape, and the landscape is the only thing that did not depopulate.