Caltavuturo ( Sicilian: ''Caltavuturu'') is a town and ''

comune A (; : , ) is an administrative division of Italy, roughly equivalent to a township or municipality. It is the third-level administrative division of Italy, after regions () and provinces (). The can also have the City status in Italy, titl ...

'' in the

Metropolitan City of Palermo The Metropolitan City of Palermo (; ) is a metropolitan city in Sicily, Italy. Its capital is the city of Palermo. It replaced the province of Palermo and comprises the city of Palermo and 82 other ''comuni'' (: ''comune''). It has 1,194,439 in ...

Sicily Sicily (Italian language, Italian and ), officially the Sicilian Region (), is an island in the central Mediterranean Sea, south of the Italian Peninsula in continental Europe and is one of the 20 regions of Italy, regions of Italy. With 4. ...

Italy Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land b ...

. The neighboring comunes are Polizzi Generosa, Scillato and Sclafani Bagni.

History

According to many scholars, the name and origin of the town are traced back to the period of Arab rule. According to Ibn al-Athir ('' The Complete History'', VII.370.5–7), in AH 268 (881/82 CE), the

Aghlabid The Aghlabid dynasty () was an Arab dynasty centered in Ifriqiya (roughly present-day Tunisia) from 800 to 909 that conquered parts of Sicily, Southern Italy, and possibly Sardinia, nominally as vassals of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Aghlabids ...

commander Abu Thawr was defeated by the Byzantines (probably commanded by the ''

strategos ''Strategos'' (), also known by its Linguistic Latinisation, Latinized form ''strategus'', is a Greek language, Greek term to mean 'military General officer, general'. In the Hellenistic world and in the Byzantine Empire, the term was also use ...

'' Mosilikes) and his was army annihilated, with only seven men surviving. The locality was later named in Arabic ''Qalʿat Abī Ṯawr'' ("Castle of Abu Thawr"), which is the origin of the modern name. Others instead maintain that the name derives from the Arabic word "qal'at" (fortress) and the Sicilian "vuturu" (vulture) meaning of "fortress of vultures." The town existed under Byzantine rule pre Arab conquest as Aziz Ahmad in "A Islamic History of Sicily" ( edinburgh university press 1975) states that in 852 Abbas raided Caltavuturo in the northern part of the Island and took many prisoners who were sold as slaves, The town was the site of the so-called Caltavuturo massacre on 20 January 1893, when local authorities killed 13 and wounded 21 peasants that had occupied communal land that they claimed was theirs.L’eccidio di «San Sebastiano»
La Sicilia, 8 February 2009

References

Municipalities of the Metropolitan City of Palermo {{Sicily-geo-stub