Giacomo Tempesta

Giacomo Tempesta is a sulphur miner, husband of Concettina Tempesta, and father of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, whose autobiographical recollections preserve both his father’s village heroism and his death in a mine collapse. His story is shaped by a striking contrast: the public honor he earned by warning Giuliana of an eruption, and the dangerous labor underground that ultimately killed him.

Identity and Family

Giacomo worked in the sulphur mines in the foothills of Mount Etna, nine or ten kilometers from Giuliana. The work separated him from home during the week. Each Saturday he and his fellow miners returned to the village, where he bathed and feasted before going to bed beside his wife, Concettina Tempesta, on their embroidered sheets. This weekly rhythm gives the account of his heroism an intimate point of departure: the warning came on a night when he was home with his family, after the ordinary reunion of a working week.

Giacomo and Concettina had three sons. Domenico was born on 11 May 1880; Pasquale Tempesta followed two years later, and Vincenzo Tempesta was born in 1883. The family chronology gives Giacomo’s celebrated act a personal consequence as well as a public one. According to the village story, the night of his warning coincided with the conception of Domenico, who was later regarded by village women as the unborn son of a hero and a child marked for distinction. That belief belongs to the community’s interpretation of events, not to any independent confirmation of destiny.

The 1879 Eruption Warning

The account of Giacomo’s heroism reaches Domenico through a chain of tellers: Concettina first related it to village women, and the story was then repeated by the women in the village. In 1879, while Giacomo lay awake beside his wife, he heard Mount Etna’s first faint rumbling and hissing after several quiet years. He rose, went to the home of Giuliana’s magistrate, and unfastened the bell from the magistrate’s cow. Carrying it through the village, he rang it and shouted to wake the citizens so they could escape.

The episode presents heroism as a sudden interruption of domestic routine. Giacomo’s warning depends on his hearing and acting before the danger becomes obvious to the village: the volcano has only begun to signal its awakening, yet he converts that faint sound into an alarm others can understand. The story does not describe the rescue in detail or specify how many people escaped. It does record that some villagers credited Concettina with helping too: she ran to the nearest tree and screamed like a siren. The family’s place in the remembered event is therefore not limited to Giacomo’s public action, even though his warning became the basis of his official recognition.

Medal and Public Standing

For his actions, Giacomo received a medal from the King of Italy. Before it reached his hands, however, the magistrate bit it to test whether it was solid gold. His horse-like teeth left their impression on the horse depicted on the medal. The magistrate later presented the marked medal to Giacomo at a formal ceremony in the village square. The object thus carried both the sign of royal honor and the physical trace of the local official who had handled it first. Domenico remembers this blemish as part of the medal’s identity, not as a detail that diminished its importance.

The award raised Giacomo’s standing in the village. After the village priest and the magistrate, he was remembered as one of its most respected men. As a boy, Domenico saw his father lead holiday parades and processions and preside with dignity over village festivals. On such occasions Giacomo took the medal from its keeping place and wore it against his breast. Its image of the King on horseback, still bearing the magistrate’s tooth marks on the horse’s golden flank, made a private family object visible in public life. The honor was not merely a story about the past: Giacomo repeatedly wore its evidence before the community.

Death and Remembrance

In March 1898, Mount Etna again brought destruction to the area. Steam escaped from a crack in its southern rim for three days and nights; after a quiet day, the earth trembled and broke the town apart. The sulphur mine section where Giacomo and his son Vincenzo were working shuddered and collapsed. Pasquale Tempesta, who was at the kiln when the shaking began, survived. Giacomo and eleven other miners and carusi died in the mine.

Domenico’s later recollection turns abruptly from the account of the disaster to direct mourning for his father’s loving guidance and anger at the earth that swallowed him. That grief changes the meaning of the earlier public story. The man honored for recognizing danger above ground was himself lost to a catastrophe in the place of his labor, alongside other workers whose deaths the account names but does not individually narrate. His medal preserves the village’s memory of rescue; Domenico’s mourning preserves the cost of the work that supported his family. Together, those memories make Giacomo both a local hero and a father whose absence remained painfully present in his son’s account.