Palermo historical timeline

Palermo was founded by the Phoenicians in the eighth century BC, taken by Rome, and held by Byzantium until the Arabs captured it in 831. Under the emirate it became the capital of Sicily and one of the largest and richest cities in the Mediterranean, with a reported four hundred mosques, irrigation engineering and citrus agriculture that the Arabs introduced.

The Normans took the city in 1072 and did something unusual: rather than expelling the population, they governed a mixed Arabic, Greek and Latin kingdom and kept the existing craftsmen. Roger II was crowned in 1130, and his court issued documents in three languages and three scripts.

That fusion is what the buildings record. The Palatine Chapel, finished in the 1140s, has Byzantine mosaics, Arabic inscriptions and a muqarnas ceiling painted with scenes of court life, inside a Latin church. It is not influence; it is collaboration.

After the Normans came the Hohenstaufen, the Angevins, and then five centuries of Spanish rule that gave Palermo its baroque churches and its palaces. The city was heavily bombed in 1943, and the post-war decades brought a period of speculative construction and organised-crime influence that Palermo has spent the years since confronting publicly.