“The most beautiful quality of stone - wrote Sebastiano Crescimanno of Melilli in 1907 - comes from the quarries of Melilli and it is exported from the island.” Of the many quarries once active around the town, the best quality of stone came from the Pirrera of Sant’Antonio, where the activity flourished in the early 20th century. The stone was scientifically classified as “white stone, limestone of the Middle Miocene epoch of the Hyblean Hills, compact, homogenous, uniform and relatively strong”, characteristics which made it very attractive to builders and stone-carvers over the centuries. Given the dimensions of the quarry, it has been calculated that the volume of stone extracted must be approximately 200.00 cubic metres. It is probable that the quarrying began in the second half of the 15th century; however it is certain that in the years after the earthquake of 1693, the Pirrera was one of the quarries exploited fully to provide the famous limestone for the many building sites that sprung up in town to restore and reconstruct the buildings destroyed by the sisma.
According to the historian from Melilli, Michele Rizzo, the fame of this stone was also due to the visit of some illustrious architects from Catania in the 18th century, who declared it to be superior in quality even to volcanic stone. Some churches of Catania, unsurprisingly, were built with, or at least decorated with stone from this quarry: not least the Church of San Francesco d'Assisi all'Immacolata. Also in the first half of the 20th century, artists like Concetto Marchese, Salvatore Zagarella and sculptors like Emilio Greco created funerary monuments, statues, busts and floral decorations in the monumental cemetery of Catania, using the white stone of Melilli. Around 1940, as documents in the archives show, approximately 1152 cubic metres of stone were quarried and exported to Siracusa, Catania, Messina, Palermo and Malta. Obviously at Melilli the use of this stone was widespread, and was employed for religious, public and private buildings.