On 1 November 1571, the Italian Basilian Order of Grottaferrata was formally organized and established as part of the Counter-Reformation strengthening of the Eastern Catholic Churches by Cardinal Giulio Antonio Santorio.

[8] Among the Albanian refugee communities and Greek villages of the Mezzogiorno, the monks of Grottaferrata set up many daughter foundations, particularly throughout Sicily and Calabria.

Even though their speakers are now overwhelmingly Roman Rite, several distinct dialects of the Modern Greek language are still widely spoken throughout southern Italy.

[9] As the one Byzantine Catholic monastery in Italy not closed down, the monks of Grottaferrata prevented the death of their monastic traditions and have contributed to its rebirth and expansion.

As Italo-Albanian refugee monks arrived from the other closed down religious houses replaced the old pro-Latinisation guard in Grottaferrata, they contributed to the rebirth of the Abbey and became notable as palaeographers, liturgists, and musicologists, as well as the main Albanologists and Byzantinists of the period.

These same monks were active promoters of reunion between West and East, with missionary evangelization of ethnicities in the Balkans that had converted to Islam under Ottoman Turkish rule, particularly after 1912 in newly Independent Albania.

Papamihali went to become a confessor and apostle of Eastern Catholicism, who was persecuted, arrested, sentenced to a labour camp, where he was buried alive by his guards after falling from exhaustion in a marsh.