Under Misterbianco, there is a church from the 1200s that lava has kept alive: Campanarazzu.

In 1669 a river of lava engulfed me, but it did not come to destroy me, rather to embrace me.

What you call a catastrophe was for me a salvation. Look for me beneath your steps, I am in a buried village.

I was the mother church dedicated to the Madonna delle Grazie of the ancient municipality Monasterium Album (now Misterbianco), when the lava entered through my doors, filled the nave and the floor, suffocated the altars, burned the roof, surrounded the columns, licked the frescoes but protected my stone bones from the passage of time.

Only my belfry survived, a symbol of resistance, until the night of 1693 when a devastating earthquake partially destroyed it. It still stood, gazing at the sky, towering among the black rock. The people of Misterbianco, after rebuilding the town further south, named this area that surrounds me Campanarazzu.

I waited four centuries before seeing the light again. I am proof that nothing truly disappears and that one can be reborn from the ashes... indeed from the basalt rock.

Almost twenty years of excavations, of deafening noises that abruptly woke me from my slumber, clad in my ancient beauty. Gradually I saw my pieces reappear and diligent men working to reassemble me.

White columns, arches and jambs in white sandstone, winged putti were reassembling and taking their original place in my nave. I breathed... I reclaimed my space, my history was ready to begin anew.

Thus I learned that I am the only church that has been saved from the devastating force of lava, the only example in late Renaissance style remaining in Eastern Sicily and within me there is also a small Gothic chapel from the 1200s. I am ready to welcome you and show you my resilience.

I. C. LEONARDO DA VINCI