The Chapel of Santa Crescenzia

You have rented a car and are heading to San Vito lo Capo in your rented apartment, until you come across a small chapel. What’s that?

The chapel of Santa Crescenzia, which boasts a great devotion popular, it rises in a particularly suggestive place and linked to the history of the town of San Vito

Legend has it that the young Vito, a Mazzara patrician son of a high official of Rome, had to flee his hometown together with the nurse Crescenzia and the tutor Modesto, who had converted him to Christianity, to escape the persecutions ordered by Diocletian.

After a few days of sailing north, a storm forced Vito's ship to land in a gulf protected from the wind by a rocky cape well known by the sailors of the time (Egitarso or Egitallo his name) and here the three would try to convert the villagers of Conturrana, which stood about three kilometers from the sea, under a high rock.

It is popular belief that San Vito had tried in vain to convert the inhabitants of the village of Conturrana, who were punished by God, for not having listened to the preaching, with a landslide that buried the town: it is believed that the mysterious village is under the huge pile of stones in the Avalanche district.

The aedicule of Santa Crescenzia instead recalls the place where the landslide stopped, saving San Vito, Modesto and the same Saint who, transgressing the divine order not to turn around so as not to witness the punishment of God, became stone for fear: according to an ancient popular belief, to unload “u scantu” (fear), you have to throw stones inside the newsstand.