|
Sicily (Sicilia in Italian) is an
autonomous region of Italy and the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, with an area of
25,700 sq. km and 5.1 million inhabitants.
Towns and Cities
Sicily's principal cities include the regional capital Palermo, together with the
other provincial capitals Catania, Messina, Siracusa, Trapani, Enna, Caltanissetta, Agrigento, Ragusa. Other famous
Sicilian towns include Cefalù, Taormina, Bronte, Marsala, Corleone, Castellammare del Golfo, and Abacaenum (now
Tripi). The regional flag is divided diagonally
yellow over red, with the trinacria symbol in the center.
Geography
NASA orbital photograph of Sicily.
The volcano Etna is situated
close to Catania. The Aeolian islands to the north are
administratively a part of Sicily, as are the Egadi Islands to the west,
Ustica Island to the north-west, and the Pelagian Islands to the
south-west.
Sicily has been noted for two millennia as a grain-producing territory: olives and
wine are among its other agricultural products. The mines of the Caltanissetta district became a leading
sulphur-producing area in the 19th century, but have declined since the 1950s.
Transport
Vehicles
A network of motorways crosses the island, much of it raised on columns due to
the mountainous terrain.
Train
Sicily is connected to the Italian peninsula by the national railway company, Trenitalia.
Air
Sicily is served by national and international flights (mainly European) from to Palermo International Airport and Catania-Fontanarossa Airport. There are also minor national airports in Trapani and the smaller islands of Pantelleria and Lampedusa.
Arts
Sicily is well known as country of art: a lot of poets and writers was born in this island. The most famous are Luigi Pirandello, Giovanni Verga, Salvatore Quasimodo, Gesualdo Bufalino and the
dialectal poet Ignazio
Buttitta. Other Sicilian artists are the music composer Vincenzo
Bellini, from Catania, and the sculptor Tommaso Geraci.
History
The autochthonous peoples of Sicily, long absorbed into the
population, were tribes known to Greek writers as the Elymi, the Sicani and the Siceli, of whom the latter two must themselves have been colonists in the island, since
they appear to have been Celts.
Sicily was colonized by Phoenicians and Punic settlers from Carthage and by Greeks,
starting in the 8th century BC. The most important colony was
established at Syracuse in 734 BC. Other
important Greek colonies were Gela, Acragas, Selinunte, Himera, and Messene. These city states were an important part of classical Greek civilization, which included Sicily as part of
Magna Graecia -- both Empedocles and Archimedes were from Sicily. Sicilian politics
was intertwined with politics in Greece itself, leading Athens, for example, mount the disastrous Sicilian Expedition during the Peloponnesian War.
The Greeks came into conflict with the Punic trading communities with ties to Carthage, which was on the African mainland not far from the southwest corner of the island, and had its own
colonies on Sicily. Palermo was a Carthaginian city, founded in the 8th century BCE, named Zis or Sis ("Panormos" to the Greeks).
Hundreds of Phoenician and Carthaginian grave sites have been found in necropoli over a large area of Palermo, now built over,
south of the Norman palace, where the Norman kings had a vast park. In the far west, Lilybaeum,(Marsala, the Arabic "Port of
Allah") never was throughly Hellenized. In the First and
Second Sicilian Wars, Carthage was in control of all but the
eastern part of Sicily, which was dominated by Syracuse.
In the 3rd century BC the Messanan Crisis motivated the intervention of the Roman Republic into Sicilian affairs, and led to the First Punic War between Rome and
Carthage. By the end of war (242 BC) all Sicily was in Roman hands.
The initial success of the Carthaginians during the Second Punic
War encouraged many of the Sicilian cities to revolt against Roman rule. Rome sent troops to put down the rebellions (it was
during the siege of Syracuse that Archimedes was killed). Carthage briefly took control of parts of Sicily, but in the end was
driven off. Many Carthaginian sympathizers were killed-- in 210 BC the Roman consul M.
Valerian told the Roman Senate that "no Carthaginian remains in Sicily".
For the next 6 centuries Sicily was a province of the Roman Empire. It was something of a rural backwater, important chiefly
for its grainfields which were a mainstay of the food supply of the city of Rome. The empire did not make much effort to Romanize
the island, which remained largely Greek. The most notable event of this period was the notorious misgovernment of Verres.
In 440 AD Sicily fell to the Vandal king
Geiseric. A few decades later it came into Ostrogothic hands, where it remained until it was conquered by the Byzantine general Belisarius in 535. But a new Ostrogoth king, Totila, drove down the Italian peninsula and then plundered and conquered Sicily in 550. He in turn was defeated and killed by the Byzantine general Narses in
552. Sicily was then ruled by the Byzantine Empire until the Arab conquest of 827-965 AD. For a brief period (662 -
668) during Byzantine rule Syracuse was the imperial capital, until Constans II was assassinated.
The cultural diversity and religious tolerance of the period of Muslim rule continued under the Normans who conquered the island in 1060-1090 (raising its status to that of a kingdom in 1130), and the south German
Hohenstaufen dynasty which ruled from 1194, adopting Palermo as its principal seat from 1220.
Conflict between the Hohenstaufen house and the Papacy led in 1266 to Sicily's conquest
by Charles I, duke of Anjou: opposition to French officialdom and taxation led in 1282 to
insurrection (the Sicilian Vespers) and successful invasion by king
Peter III of Aragón.
Ruled from 1479 by the kings of Spain, Sicily
suffered a ferocious outbreak of plague (1656), followed by a damaging earthquake in the
east of the island (1693). Periods of rule by the crown of Savoy (1713-20) and then the Austrian Habsburgs gave way to union (1734) with the Bourbon-ruled kingdom of
Naples as the kingdom of the Two
Sicilies.
The scene in 1820 and 1848 of abortive
revolutionary movements against Bourbon denial of constitutional government, Sicily was joined with the kingdom of Italy in
1860 following the expedition of Giuseppe Garibaldi. In 1894 labour agitation through the radical
Fasci dei lavoratori led to the imposition of martial law.
Despite some economic development in the half-century after Italian unification, Sicily was largely bypassed by the industrial
growth which transformed the larger urban areas of northern Italy. The organised crime networks commonly known as the mafia extended their influence in the late 19th century (and many of its operatives also
emigrated to other countries, particularly the United States); partly
suppressed under the Fascist regime beginning in the 1920s, they recovered following the World War II Allied invasion of Sicily.
An autonomous region from 1946, Sicily benefited to some extent from the partial Italian
land reform of 1950-62 and special funding from the
Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, the Italian government's Fund for the South (1950-84). The island returned to the headlines in 1992, however, when the assassination of two anti-mafia magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino
triggered a general upheaval in Italian political life.
Sicilian language
The language spoken by the majority of Sicilians is not Italian, but a separate Romance language desended from Latin but as
distinct from Italian as Spanish is from Italian.
Sicilian or "Sicilianu," has many Arabic root words as well as Catalan, French and Spanish
influences owing to the many different rulers of the Island. Sicilian is also spoken around Reggio di Calabria in Italy, and in
southern Puglia; also in Italy.
Siclian uses the word ending U for masculine words and A for feminine. The plural is I as it is in Italian. Sicilian replaces
the Italian LL for DD so that "Bello" becomes "BEDDU."
See also
External links
|