The island has been inhabited since the remotest time, as we know from the archaeological sites scattered around all over it. Scholars refer at least to the end of the 5th millennium B.C. After the Hellenistic-Roman presences on the Island, then where periods of abandonment, followed by slow repopulation.

However, perhaps the abandonment was never total, thanks to the Leni valley that gave shelter to the inhabitants. The rest is well-known history. Mercantile activity attained such pro- portions that the inhabitants of Salina, above all at Santa Marina, managed to become entrepreneurs of themselves, until they achieved such a status as to want to break away at lost from the colonial dominion of Lipari. They succeeded in doing this on 7 February 1867 and Santa Marina became the chief place on the island. Unfortunately, however, In 1889 phylloxera destroyed a lot of vines, forcing many island people to move away. In 1909 the communes of Matfa and Leni came into being. They were the emblem of an ethnic-cultural diversity accentuated by the geographical divisions of a territory that was often hostile to social interpenetration.