Above: A version of a negroni created in honor of Mount Etna at Moro Acireale superimposed over a view of the simmering volcano in the distance.
Ambling sounded appealing, and, with a tenth of the population of bustling Catania, nearby Acireale beckoned. The predominant style of its architecture is Late Sicilian Baroque, sometimes referred to as “Earthquake Baroque.”
Then came an earthquake so horrible and ghastly that the soil undulated like the waves of a stormy sea, and the mountains danced as if drunk, and the city collapsed in one miserable moment….”
Account from an eyewitness to the 1693 Val di Noto Earthquake, The Genesis of Noto: An Eighteenth-Century Sicilian City, Stephen Tobriner, University of California Press, 1982
At the start of the new year in 1693, Mother Nature cursed most of southeastern Sicily with a triple whammy: Etna erupted; an earthquake believed to have measured well above 7 on the Richter Scale struck; and a tsunami hit. One way or another, more than 60,000 perished in the disaster.
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