San Cono

San Cono is a small Sicilian village set in the Monti Erei, at the foot of Monte San Marco. Around it, fertile hills are worked into orchards, vineyards, almond and olive groves, with long rows of prickly pears giving the countryside its most recognisable character.

The village has a clearly defined late-eighteenth-century origin. Its territory was once part of the old feud of Dainamare and Santo Cono, before San Cono was founded as an inhabited centre in 1785 by Marquis Ottavio Trigona, after he obtained the *licentia populandi*. The new settlement grew around a rural economy, with houses and land offered to farmers from the surrounding area.

That agricultural identity still shapes San Cono’s image today. Known as the “City of the prickly pear”, it is a village where landscape, memory and local character remain closely tied to cultivation, and where the old distinction between the upper and lower parts of town adds a further layer to its small but distinctive Sicilian identity.