TOURISTIC LOCALITY

A few years before his death on 22 June 1101, the Grand Count and Apostolic Legate Roger I de Hauteville founded a Benedictine convent on the hill where Cathedral of Patti now stands.
It was 1094 and that foundation marked the official date of the birth of the Tyrrhenian town: around the convent and the Norman abbey, there rapidly began to develop a rural village, the original nucleos of the modern town.
Subsequentially, the Grand Count's son, King Roger II, made it the seat of a bishopric and conferred on it the rank of a royal town, and had a Church built there to receive the mortal remains of his mother, Queen Adelaide, who died in Patti 1118.
After beeing sacked by Frederick II, who thus decided to punished it for its fidelity to the Angeovians, Patti was rebuilt and endoved with strong defensive walls, and then became one of the 52 towns forming the royal estate in Sicily.
Dispite a second devastation in 1544, it revived once again and, especially starting from the first half of the seventeenth century, developped uninterruptedly, until becoming today, one of the finest and most interesting towns in this stretch of Tyrrhenian coast.
During the building of the motorway at Patti Marina a remains of a Roman Villa came to light.
Covering an area of about 20.000 square meters and not yet fully explored, the big villa was built in the imperial age.
Up today, archaeologists have brought to light nomerous parts and places floored with magnificent mosaics.