Paternò

Paternò (Sicilian: Patennò) is a town and comune in the province of Catania, Sicily, southern Italy.

History

The site of Paternò was settled before 3500 BCE. Its inhabitants were probably the Sicani, although it was located in mainly Sicel territory; its initial name was Inessa. The modern name derives form the Greek Paeter Aitnaion, meaning the "Fortress of the Etnaeans". The presence of another town, called Hybla Mayor or Galeatis, is attested north west to the current town.

A centre of medium importance in the Greek and Roman eras, it was largely depopulated in the three centuries before 1000 AD; during the subsequent Arab domination of Sicily, it was known as Batarnù. After the Norman conquest in the 1040s, it was renamed Paternionis and began a period of flourishing. It was here that King Frederick III of Sicily created the Camera Reginale ("Queen's Chamber") as a wedding gift for his wife Eleanor of Anjou, and this was inherited by the subsequent Queens of Sicily. This period of splendour for Paternò lasted until the 15th century, when it became a fief and in consequence slowly lost importance.

Padarn

Another Paternus was a bishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Zaragoza from 1040–1077.

Padarn (Latin: Paternus) (d. c.550) was an early 6th century sanctified British Christian abbot-bishop, the eponymous founder of St Padarn's Church, Llanbadarn Fawr,Kingdom of Ceredigion, near present-day Aberystwyth, Wales. Also traditionally the first bishop of Braga, Saint Paternus of Avranches in Normandy appears to be the same person. Padarn also built a monastery in Vannes and is considered one of the seven founder saints of Brittany. Padarn's early vita is one of five insular and two Breton saints' lives that mention King Arthur independently of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae.

Life

The Vita Sancti Paterni, a major source for biographical details of Padarn, may be an epitome of a previous, more extensive source. In it Padarn is Armorican by race, born to "Petran, his father, and Guean, his mother". His parents "dedicated themselves to Christ" and Petran left Letavia (modern Brittany) for Ireland. Thomas Wakeman names Padarn a nephew of Hoel of Cornouaille.