Exhibition-Market of the Sanfratellano Horse

San Fratello, once called Apollonia, is a historic town in the province of Messina located on the Nebrodi Mountains at about 640 meters above sea level. Founded by Adelaide di Monferrato who moved a Lombard community there, before the landslide of 1922 it was considered a city of worship with 27 sacred buildings including convents and monasteries. Today's town takes its name from the three Saints brothers, Alfio, Cirino and Filadelfio, martyred under the emperor Valerio. San Fratello is also known for its Gallo-Italic dialect, evidence of the passage in the Sicilian city of settlers from Northern Italy.

Inserted in the naturalistic context of the Nebrodi park, the non-wooded areas are used for grazing cattle, sheep, goats and Sanfratellani horses that live in the wild. Every year a day is organized exclusively dedicated to the “Sanfratellano” horse, an extraordinary native animal. Some scholars argue that the breed derives from Sicilian horses (equus sicanus) famous in antiquity and mentioned by the Greeks and Romans. Others affirm that they descend from the horses that the Lombards had left in the retinue of Queen Adelaide of Casale Monferrato, third wife of Ruggero I. This theory is confirmed by some characteristics of the breed, very similar to those of the Swabian-Germanic and Lombard horses, even if , due to crossbreeding and environmental adaptation, the Sanfratellano has changed its somatic characteristics.

The first news of crosses made to improve the characteristics dates back to the early decades of the 1800s when specimens of the Sanfratellana breed were crossed with stallions of German, English, Maremma and Salerno origin.

Since then a long work has been done to exalt the qualities of robustness and resistance to fatigue and to adapt the specimens to the environment in which the population is raised in the wild. In particular, it emerges that, in the last century, the Sanfratellano was crossed with stallions of English and Eastern derivation (1925) in order to correct some defects (modest stature) without however softening the shapes. Starting from 1935, six stallions were introduced in the selected stations, one of which is an oriental derivative (Bricco), a Maremmano (Zello) and four English derivatives (Dardo, Errante, Elini, Maccarese) in order to fix the acquired characters. The products of these stallions were used for interracial crossbreeding and therefore completed the formation of the current model of the Sanfratellano Horse. Currently the population of Sanfratellani horses amounts to about 5000 units, with about 1600 mares.