Mascali

Mascali is a town on the eastern side of Mount Etna, where volcanic slopes, rural hamlets and the Ionian coastal plain meet. Its name is said to come from a Greek-Byzantine word linked to wooded or branching land, reflecting origins associated with Byzantine Sicily and a territory long shaped by the mountain above it.

Its identity is unusually tied to a modern act of refoundation. The old settlement, already devastated by the 1693 earthquake, was completely destroyed by the Etna eruption of 7 November 1928, described as the only 20th-century eruption of the volcano to erase an inhabited centre. The present town was rebuilt lower down near the sea in the 1930s, with broad orthogonal streets and a planned layout associated with the Fascist and Rationalist period.

Earlier layers still give Mascali depth: after Arab and Norman phases, Roger II donated it to the Diocese of Catania, and in 1543 Bishop Niccolò Maria Caracciolo took the title Count of Mascali under Charles V. What makes Mascali distinctive is this close contrast between lava memory, ecclesiastical history and a rebuilt coastal townscape beneath Etna.