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

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

Flag of Sicily 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 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 seperate 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."

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