Castroreale

The ridge that carries the town sits between the Peloritani slopes and the Tyrrhenian, 394 meters above the Milazzo plain, a position that gave the place its name: castrum regale, the royal fortress. By the fifteenth century a Jewish community lived in the quarter behind what became the Monte di Pietà, and an arch of the lost Synagogue still stands there. The 1717 earthquake killed many residents and brought down buildings across the town, a break that separates what survives now from what came before it.

Against that loss, the church count is striking: over eighty churches for barely 2,246 people, a density that has left more sacred buildings than the town could ever have kept in active use, which is part of why so much of what remains ended up gathered into a single museum rather than left scattered through the countryside. The upper ridge, the site of the vanished Jewish quarter, and the churches spread through the streets below are three layers of the same small footprint, royal, mercantile and devotional, compressed onto one spur of rock above the plain.