Castellammare del Golfo

History of Castellammare del Golfo

The town began as Emporium Segestanorum, the port serving the ancient inland city of Segesta, noted by the geographers Ptolemy and Strabo. After the Arab conquest of 827 AD it was renamed Al Madarig ("the steps"), for the steep street climbing from the harbor to the fortified point above it — where the Arabs built the first castle. The Normans enlarged that fortress and the Swabians added to its defenses; it is first documented in 1154 by the Arab geographer al-Idrisi. Control of the castle passed between the Angevins and Aragonese in the 1310s, and later through a succession of noble families.

Fishing has anchored the local economy since antiquity — the tuna fishery at nearby Scopello dates to at least the 13th century — and the town's name itself, "sea fortress on the gulf," reflects that maritime identity. In the early 20th century, heavy emigration to the United States carried the town's name across the Atlantic: Castellammare del Golfo was the birthplace of Salvatore Maranzano, Joseph Bonanno and Stefano Magaddino, whose power struggle among Sicilian-American crime families in New York became known as the Castellammarese War (1930–31).

Today the town's history is layered into what visitors see: the castle (now a museum), the 18th-century Chiesa Madre, the working harbor below — and, just beyond town, Segesta's ancient Greek ruins and the Zingaro reserve, itself created in 1981 after a landmark 1980 protest saved the coastline from a planned road.

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