Graniti

Graniti is a small village in Sicily’s Alcantara Park area, set in the valley of the Petrolo stream, a left tributary of the Alcantara River. Mountains, hills, woods and cultivated land frame its rural character, with orchards, vineyards and olive groves giving the surrounding landscape a strongly agricultural identity.

Its origins are thought to reach back to the Arab or Saracen period, possibly as early as the 9th century, while the first known written mention of Graniti dates to 1117. In the Middle Ages it became part of the feudal world of eastern Sicily, and the present settlement later took shape around a 17th-century hamlet linked to the Count of Taormina, before expanding further in the 19th century.

Today Graniti remains closely tied to village traditions, farming life and the cultural memory of the artist Giuseppe Mazzullo. Its distinctiveness lies in this combination of Alcantara valley landscape, early medieval roots and a compact rural identity that has grown from a former feudal hamlet into a living Sicilian borgo.