Sicily historical timeline

Origins

Three peoples held the island before the colonists came: Sicani, Siculi and Elymians. From 735 BC Greek settlers founded cities along the east and south — Naxos, then Syracuse, Gela, Selinunte, Akragas. These were not outposts. Syracuse became one of the largest cities in the Greek world, defeated an Athenian invasion in 413 BC, and was home to Archimedes. Carthage held the west, and the two fought over the island for three centuries.

Rome and Byzantium

The First Punic War made Sicily Rome's first province in 241 BC, and its grain fed the capital. Roman Sicily was wealthy but provincial — the mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale near Piazza Armerina are its most complete survival. Byzantine rule followed the empire's collapse.

The decisive turn: Arab and Norman Sicily

Arab forces took the island from 827, and the two centuries that followed changed it permanently. Palermo became one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean. Irrigation was rebuilt, and citrus, sugar cane, rice, cotton, aubergine and the technique of drying pasta arrived. Sicilian still carries several hundred Arabic words, including many place names beginning calat- or gibil-.

Norman adventurers took the island between 1061 and 1091 — and, unusually for the period, kept what they found. Roger II, crowned in 1130, ran a court operating in Latin, Greek and Arabic and employed all three traditions' craftsmen. The Cappella Palatina, with its Islamic wooden ceiling above Byzantine mosaics in a Latin church, is the clearest statement of what that kingdom was. His grandson Frederick II, raised in Palermo, ruled as Holy Roman Emperor from Sicily and ran the most intellectually ambitious court in Europe.

Long decline

The Sicilian Vespers of 1282 ended French rule and brought in the Aragonese; the island then passed through Spanish and Bourbon hands, governed as a periphery for five centuries. Land concentrated in the latifondi. The 1693 earthquake destroyed the south-east, which was rebuilt in the Baroque now listed by UNESCO.

Unification and after

Garibaldi landed at Marsala in 1860 with a thousand volunteers and took the island in months, delivering it to the new Italian kingdom. Expectations of land reform went unmet; mass emigration followed, and between 1880 and 1920 well over a million Sicilians left, mostly for the Americas. The post-war period brought regional autonomy — Sicily has a special statute and its own assembly — alongside the long confrontation with Cosa Nostra, which reached its worst in the 1980s and early 1990s and produced the killings of the magistrates Falcone and Borsellino in 1992. The public reaction to those murders marked a real shift, and the anti-mafia movement that followed is now part of ordinary civic life.

What is visible now

The layering is the point. Syracuse's cathedral is a Doric temple with its columns still embedded in the walls. Palermo's churches carry Arabic inscriptions. Norman cloisters use Islamic pointed arches. The Baroque towns exist because of one night in 1693.