With its monumental history and culture, dramatic changing landscapes, fine cuisine and near perfect year round climate Sicily might just steal your heart.

The History

A quick gallop through history, so that you might be able to put some of the incredible wealth of buildings and monuments in their rather confusing context!

Sicily, which is often thought of as the football at the toe of Italy, in fact owes much more of its historical importance to its position in the centre of the Mediterranean, dominating the sea passage between the western and eastern basins. For many centuries, until the opening up of sea routes to India and the Americas moved the centres of European power firmly to the west, it was in a vitally important position between Western and Eastern European powers, and between Christians and Muslims and could not be ignored by anyone seeking to establish domination in the area.

The island had well established earlier cultures, but by the 8th century BC was being taken over bit by bit by Greeks from various cities, who were at the time expanding throughout southern Italy. The Greeks fought off continuing threats from Carthage, who was expanding her cities and trade at the same time, and from the 3rd to 5th centuries BC there was a Greek golden age in the island, when rich cities were founded and flourished, and all the important monuments remaining today, temples and theatres, were built.

But outside threats continued, and became more dangerous, and Sicily eventually fell under Roman rule. The Romans did not treat Sicily well, using it as a grain store and taxing it heavily, and economic decline continued for centuries, until the island came under Arab rule in the 9th century AD, and a new period of prosperity and importance began.

The already long march of conquerors continued, with the arrival of the Normans. Their more successful kings built grandly, endowing Sicily with another layer of masterpieces, and also continued the tradition of the Arab rulers in encouraging the widespread use of many languages, and liberality in religion. Under the next rulers, and especially under the Emperor Frederick II, who was also Holy Roman Emperor, Sicily reached the height of her medieval power and importance - literature, translation and science flourished, and Sicily even had the world's first written constitution.

Events lead to a short and not happy period of French rule, and then to centuries of domination by Spain. Despite the glories of Baroque building, Spanish rule did little overall for Sicily. Renaissance glories hardly touched the island, which became again, as under the Romans just a source of tax money.

At the time of the Napoleonic wars, it was thought and even planned that Britain might annexe Sicily, but this was never put into action. The Sicilians were once again left to their rather dire fate under their restored Bourbon rulers, until the arrival and victory of Garibaldi and his troops meant that the island could take a part in the building of united Italy.

Allied forces, American, British, Canadians and others used Sicily as the launch point for the re-invasion of Europe in 1943. However, after the war, as part of the restored Italian state, Sicily suffered its by now accustomed fate in being ignored and totally underfunded. The reformer and humanitarian Danilo Dolci made Sicilian poverty a byword in Europe when he publicised his work in some of the Northern villages in the late 1950's.

Little of this obvious poverty remains, at least at first sight, in Sicily today. On the surface Sicily looks and functions like most other southern European states.

But the very richness and complexity of its history, and the wealth and confusion of traces left by all the different regimes cause one to stop and think, and to try to see beneath the surface in the hope of understanding a little of where Sicily and the Sicilians are today.