My cousin, Nella Cartafalsa, whom I wrote about in The Stone Boudoir, got married to a farmer from Sambuca and moved there. I have visited them in Sambuca. Lots of Maggios in Sambuca. Its name comes from the Arabic word Zabut, the Magnificent. North Africans settled there, close to S. Margherita Belice, in the eighth century.
From The Guardian:
Sat 26 Jan 2019 14.00 GMT
Darkness falls on the small town of Sambuca di Sicilia, where the council offices on Corso Umberto have been closed for more than three hours. And yet the phones keep ringing, hour after hour.
"They're calling from Sydney, London, New York," says the exhausted deputy mayor, Giuseppe Cacioppo. A week after the town announced it was putting up abandoned homes for sale at a euro each, he has fielded requests for information from all over the globe. By Wednesday last week the council had received more than 300 calls and 94,000 emails. Many prospective buyers, not wanting to miss out, grabbed the first available flight to Palermo.
Sambuca sits inside a nature reserve, surrounded by woods and mountains, about an hour's drive from the Sicilian capital.
In the town hall's minuscule waiting room there are not enough seats for the dozens of visitors who have come from as far away as Panama, London, Boston and Dubai to get their hands on one of these famed homes for the cost of an espresso. They're waiting anxiously for Cacioppo to take them on a guided tour of the ruins that are up for sale.