PATTI, DIOCESE of. — City and diocese in Sicily, suffragan of Messina, with an area of 1,330 sq. km., a population of 218,000 inhabitants, of whom 217,800 are Catholics, 40 municipalities, 71 parishes, 180 diocesan and 24 religious priests, 7 male and 31 female religious communities (Ann. Pont., 1952, p. 313). Patrons: SS. Bartolomeo and Febronia.
The city lies 76 km. from the provincial capital, near ancient « Tyndaris », whose Greco-Roman ruins are visible on a precipitous cliff overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. There is no information about P. prior to the Norman period. Count Ruggero founded a Benedictine abbey there, which he united with that of Lipari; the two abbeys were erected into a single bishopric by the antipope Anacletus II in 1131, but the legitimate institution was the work of Pope Eugenius III in 1157. Boniface IX separated the two sees in 1399. The first bishop of autonomous P. was Francesco Hermemir; among the noteworthy bishops were Bartolomeo Sebastiani (1548), who took an active part in the Council of Trent, and Alfonso de los Cameros (1652), who founded the Seminary. P. suffered serious damage during the War of the Sicilian Vespers; in the 16th century it was set on fire during a raid by the Turks. It is not rich in monuments; the Cathedral is a fourteenth-century building, erected over an earlier Norman structure and remodeled in the 18th–19th centuries: it preserves the sarcophagus of Queen Adelasia, wife of Ruggero I and mother of Ruggero II; the sacristy houses precious Greek and Latin parchments and an interesting treasury. Noteworthy are, in the municipality of Frazzanò, the Basilian abbey of S. Filippo di Fragalà (11th century), and at Mistretta and Tusa the mother church with a medieval bell tower. Near the ruins of « Tyndaris » stands the celebrated sanctuary (16th century), with a miraculous Byzantine statue of the Virgin (the Black Madonna), a destination for numerous pilgrimages.