Gioiosa Guardia

Gioiosa Guardia (or Gioiosa Vecchia) was a town founded by Vinciguerra d'Aragona, appointed under the reign of Frederick III of Aragon, on Mount Meliuso in Sicily. Today only a few old ruins remain.

The town was allowed to build towers and fortresses wherever it saw fit, to defend the territory against pirate raids.

The patron saint of Gioiosa Guardia was first Saint John the Baptist, then Saint Nicholas. Several legends explain the change.

One legend tells that a great famine struck Gioiosa Guardia. The poor inhabitants no longer knew which saint to pray to, when one day they saw a sailing boat in the distance approaching the beach, and once there it unloaded a large amount of wheat. Overjoyed, the people of Gioiosa went down to the shore and offered their riches in exchange for the wheat. The captain refused any payment and handed out the grain without saying who he was or where he was going.

Some years later, a few people from Gioiosa went to Bari on business. Entering a church, they recognised in an image of Saint Nicholas the merchant who had saved them from the famine. Back home they told what they had seen: nobody doubted that the captain had been Saint Nicholas, who was proclaimed the town's new patron.

Gioiosa Guardia was abandoned after yet another earthquake in 1783. At the foot of the mountain, in an area called "ciappe di tono" (then owned by the Giardina family of Patti), the new Gioiosa was founded, called Gioiosa Marea.

Text: Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0 · translated from Italian