🇮🇹 Italy · Islands (Sicily and Sardinia)
Sicily is not simply 'an island of Italy': it is a world of its own, a crossroads of civilisations in the middle of the Mediterranean where Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans and Spaniards left their mark layer upon layer. In a few kilometres you go from a Doric Greek temple better preserved than many in Greece, to a Norman cathedral covered in golden mosaics by Byzantine craftsmen, to a street market that smells and sounds like an Arab souk. All of it under the shadow of Etna, the highest active volcano in Europe, which smokes over the landscape and now and then turns the night red.
But Sicily is also intensely sensory and pleasure-loving: it is granita with brioche for breakfast, a hot arancino eaten standing up, cannoli filled on the spot, fresh fish in the markets of Palermo, Etna wine and long conversations after a meal. It is the golden Baroque of Noto and Syracuse, turquoise beaches, villages perched on cliffs such as Taormina and Cefalù, and warm, proud people with a sense of humour all their own. Travelling Sicily means letting yourself be carried by that Mediterranean rhythm, a little chaotic and absolutely charming.
This guide covers the essentials of the island with a practical eye: Palermo and its Arab-Norman treasures, Monreale, Taormina and the Isola Bella, the climb up Etna, the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento, Syracuse and Ortigia, Cefalù and the Villa Romana del Casale. We tell you how to get there and get around (spoiler: it is best to rent a car), what verified admissions cost, when to go and what to eat. Sicily takes time and some logistics, but it repays you with one of the most complete and memorable trips in all of Europe.
Sicily's history is the history of the whole Mediterranean. Inhabited by Sicani, Siculi and Elymians, it was colonised by the Greeks from the 8th century BC, who turned it into the heart of Magna Graecia: Syracuse came to rival Athens and Agrigento was one of the richest cities in the ancient world. After the Punic Wars it passed to Rome in 241 BC and became the Empire's 'granary'. In 827 the Arabs conquered it and ruled for two and a half centuries, transforming agriculture, language and the cities; in 1091 the Normans, led by Roger I and then Roger II, created a brilliant, tolerant kingdom where Latin, Greek and Arab cultures lived side by side. Then came the Swabians, the Angevins — expelled in the Sicilian Vespers of 1282 — the Aragonese and the Bourbons, under the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at Marsala with his Thousand and joined the island to a unified Italy. In 1943, the Allies landed in Sicily to begin the liberation of Europe. The 20th century was also marked by the mafia and by the anti-mafia struggle, with landmarks such as the murders of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. All that history, with its dates and protagonists, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The two great islands of the Mediterranean: Sicily, a crossroads of Greeks, Arabs and Normans, from the Vespers to Garibaldi and from the drama of the mafia to the courage of the anti-mafia movement; and Sardinia, land of the nuraghi, the judicates, Aragon and the House of Savoy.
Read the history of Islands (Sicily and Sardinia) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before Rome existed, Sicily was already a contested world. Its first known inhabitants were three peoples: the Sicani, whom tradition placed in the centre and west; the Siculi, who came from the Italian peninsula and gave the island its name; and the Elymians of the north-west, around Segesta and Erice. On top of them came the Phoenicians, who founded trading posts in the west (Mozia, Palermo, Solunto), and above all the Greeks, who from the 8th century BC began an intense colonisation that would make the island the heart of Magna Graecia.
In 734 BC colonists from Chalcis founded Naxos, and shortly afterwards Corinthians founded Syracuse (733 BC), which would become the most powerful Greek city in the West. Gela, Selinunte, Messina and Catania followed and, in 582 BC, Akragas (the future Agrigento), which the poet Pindar called "the most beautiful of mortal cities". These city-states raised colossal Doric temples — the ones that astonish today in the Valley of the Temples, at Selinunte and at Segesta — and produced philosophers, tyrants and mathematicians. Syracuse was the home of Archimedes, one of the greatest geniuses of Antiquity.
Syracuse's power was proved in 413 BC, when it destroyed the great military expedition Athens had sent to conquer it during the Peloponnesian War: it was one of the greatest disasters in Athenian history, and thousands of prisoners ended up digging in the city's quarries, the latomie. Under tyrants such as Gelon, Dionysius I and Hiero II, Syracuse dominated much of the island and clashed again and again with Carthage, the Phoenician power of North Africa, which controlled western Sicily. For centuries Sicily was a chessboard on which Greeks and Carthaginians fought over the central Mediterranean.
The rivalry between Rome and Carthage dragged Sicily in. The First Punic War (264-241 BC) was largely fought on the island and in its waters, and ended in Roman victory: in 241 BC Sicily became Rome's first province outside the Italian peninsula. Syracuse held out for a few more years as an ally of Carthage, until it was taken after a long siege in 212 BC, during which — according to tradition — Archimedes was killed by a Roman soldier.
Under Rome, Sicily became the 'granary' of the Republic and the Empire: its enormous estates, worked by multitudes of slaves, supplied the capital with wheat. That exploitation caused two great slave rebellions, the Servile Wars (2nd century BC), and famous episodes of corruption, such as the governorship of the praetor Verres, denounced by Cicero. Late Roman Sicily has left one dazzling piece of evidence: the Villa Romana del Casale, near Piazza Armerina, with the largest surviving collection of Roman mosaics in the world.
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the island passed through Vandal, Ostrogothic and above all Byzantine hands: for a brief time in the 7th century, Syracuse was even the capital of the Byzantine Empire. But the deepest change came in 827, when the Arab conquest began. It took the Muslims decades to master the island — Palermo fell in 831, Syracuse not until 878 — and they ruled for more than two centuries. Islamic Sicily was prosperous and refined: the Arabs introduced new crops (citrus, sugar cane, cotton, pistachios), irrigation systems, techniques and words that still survive in Sicilian dialect and cooking. Palermo became one of the largest and most brilliant cities in the Mediterranean, with hundreds of mosques and busy trade.
In the mid-11th century, Norman adventurers from northern France — the same stock that conquered England in 1066 — set their sights on Sicily. Led by Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger de Hauteville (Roger I), they began a conquest in 1061 that ended in 1091 with control of the whole island. Instead of destroying the Arab culture they found, the Normans did something exceptional for the age: they absorbed it. The kingdom they founded was one of the most advanced and tolerant states in medieval Europe.
Its great architect was Roger II, crowned king of Sicily in 1130. His court in Palermo was a unique crossroads of Latin, Byzantine Greek and Arab cultures: several languages were spoken, coins were minted with Arabic inscriptions, Muslim geographers such as al-Idrisi worked there — he produced a famous map of the world for the king — and Christians, Muslims and Jews lived side by side. Out of that fusion came the Arab-Norman style, one of the most original artistic expressions of the Middle Ages: the Palatine Chapel, with its Byzantine mosaics and its Islamic muqarnas ceiling; the cathedrals of Cefalù and Monreale, covered in gold; churches with red domes of oriental air. That ensemble is today a Unesco World Heritage Site.
The crown then passed by marriage to the Swabian Hohenstaufen dynasty. Its most notable figure was Frederick II (1194-1250), king of Sicily and Holy Roman Emperor, nicknamed stupor mundi (the wonder of the world) for his learning, his scientific curiosity and his polyglot court, where poetry in the Sicilian language — the cradle of literary Italian — and the knowledge of three religions flourished. With his death, however, the decline began: the papacy and the European powers fought over the rich island, which gradually lost its independence and its central role.
After the Hohenstaufen, the pope handed Sicily to Charles of Anjou, brother of the king of France. Angevin rule was harsh and unpopular, and it exploded in a revolt engraved on the island's memory: the Sicilian Vespers. On Easter Monday 1282, in Palermo, an incident — by tradition, the harassment of a Sicilian woman by a French soldier at the hour of vespers — set off a general insurrection in which thousands of French were massacred. The rebellion expelled the Angevins and offered the crown to Peter III of Aragon, married to a Hohenstaufen heiress.
So began a long period under the Crown of Aragon and later under the kings of Spain. For centuries, Sicily was governed by viceroys in the name of a distant monarchy. It was an age of relative marginalisation: the island, once the centre of the Mediterranean, ended up on the periphery of the great empires, with an economy dominated by great estates and a powerful nobility. The earthquake of 1693 devastated the south-east and led to the rebuilding of entire cities — Noto, Ragusa, Modica, Catania — in a splendid late Baroque style, today also a Unesco World Heritage Site.
In the 18th century, after several changes of hands, Sicily was joined to Naples under the Bourbon dynasty, forming the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, the largest state in pre-unification Italy. The Bourbons governed from Naples, and Sicily again felt sidelined and exploited, with an impoverished peasantry facing a landowning aristocracy. That social unease and economic backwardness would be the backdrop to the great changes of the 19th century.
In 1860, Sicily became the decisive stage of Italian unification. On 11 May, Giuseppe Garibaldi landed at Marsala with just over a thousand volunteers, the famous red-shirted Mille. Backed by Sicilian peasants fed up with Bourbon government, he defeated the royal troops at Calatafimi and in Palermo and, within months, conquered the whole island and the south of the peninsula. The expedition precipitated the end of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and the joining of the south to the new unified Italy, proclaimed a kingdom in 1861.
Union, however, did not bring the hoped-for prosperity. The new state, centralised in the north, did not solve the south's backwardness; taxes, compulsory military service and the persistence of the great estates fed discontent and episodes of banditry. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, poverty pushed hundreds of thousands of Sicilians to emigrate, above all to the Americas: entire communities in Argentina and the United States have Sicilian roots. Novels such as The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, portrayed that transition with clarity, and its famous line that "everything must change so that everything can stay the same".
In the Second World War, Sicily was again a key point. In July 1943, the Allies launched Operation Husky, the Anglo-American landing on the beaches of the south of the island, the largest amphibious operation of the war up to that point. In little more than a month they took Sicily, which precipitated Mussolini's fall and opened the way to the Italian campaign. The island, occupied and bombed, was left devastated; the postwar years brought reconstruction, partial land reform and, in 1946, the granting of a special statute of autonomy that Sicily still holds today.
No honest look at contemporary Sicily can avoid the phenomenon of the mafia, Cosa Nostra, which arose in the 19th century in the power vacuum between the great estates and the state. For decades, criminal organisations controlled wide sectors of the economy and public life through extortion, violence and political complicity. In the 1970s and 1980s, the war between clans and the offensive against the state left hundreds dead, among them magistrates, police officers, journalists and politicians.
The answer came from Sicilian society itself and from a group of brave judges. The so-called Palermo 'anti-mafia pool', led by Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, prepared the 'maxi-trial' in the mid-1980s, a historic case which, thanks in part to the testimony of the informer Tommaso Buscetta, led to the conviction of hundreds of mafiosi and proved in court for the first time the existence and structure of Cosa Nostra. It was an unprecedented blow.
The revenge was brutal. On 23 May 1992, Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca Morvillo and three escort officers were killed when an explosive charge went off under the motorway at Capaci, near Palermo. Barely two months later, on 19 July, Paolo Borsellino and five of his escort officers were murdered by a car bomb on via D'Amelio in Palermo. The attacks shook Italy and provoked a decisive popular and state reaction against the mafia. Today, the names of Falcone and Borsellino are given to Palermo airport and to trees, schools and squares across the island; the anti-mafia movement, the culture of "I don't pay the pizzo" (the extortion money) and an active civil society have transformed both the image and the reality of Sicily. Remembering that history soberly, without romanticising it, is part of really getting to know the island.