In summer, when the streams are dry, water comes up out of the ground near the coast by itself: it is the aquifer, filled by the September rains, which takes six months to work its way down from the Peloritani to the plain. Pliny the Elder already told of the phenomenon.
In the late nineteenth century those springs were channelled into ditches known here as saie, and there, until the last century, wool was washed for mattresses and pillows. The town, born as a medieval hamlet and rebuilt from 1526 after being abandoned, was for a century a district of Roccavaldina: a comune of its own only since 1923. The sbergia, the local nectarine, comes from here. There are 7,426 residents.
Arancino · Pasta alla Norma · Pitone messinese
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Next up: Saint Paulinus the Bishop, patron of a parish born from emancipation from Roccavaldina, Tuesday 22 June
Nearest airport: Reggio Calabria, 30 km away
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📅 Every year, on 22 June
Torregrotta celebrates Saint Paulinus the Bishop on 22 June; his church, opened in 1943, holds a 17th-century painting of the Deposition of Christ that once adorned the altar of the old church of San Paolino, whose parish was established in 1921 at the height of a long emancipation from neighbouring Roccavaldina.
Saffron rice, ragù with peas and caciocavallo inside a golden cone-shaped crust: in Catania it is masculine and pointed, and the quarrel with Palermo over the name is serious.
Read more →A thin sheet of dough folded into a half-moon and fried, with escarole, tuma cheese, anchovies and black pepper inside: Messina’s street food, to eat hot straight from the rosticceria.
Read more →Straight-line distances from the town centre. Tap a point to open its page.
The closest destinations covered by our editors, with straight-line distance.
