50 Fun Facts About Sicily

Which city is the capital of Sicily?

Palermo. Phoenician traders founded it, and it became the island's chief city after Arab forces captured it in 831 and made it their capital.

Sicily takes its name from which Iron Age people who lived in the east of the island?

The Sicels. Tradition held that they had once lived in central Italy, near the Tiber, before some of them crossed to the island that took their name.

Which ancient Greek name for Sicily describes the island's shape?

Trinacria. It means 'three headlands', for the capes at the island's corners, and the ancients took it to be Homer's Thrinacia, where Odysseus's crew ate the Sun god's cattle.

What is Sicily's most prominent landmark and Europe's tallest active volcano?

Mount Etna. Its height is never fixed: about 50 eruptions in six months of 2021 piled enough lava and ash on one crater rim to make the mountain some 30 metres taller.

What separates Sicily from Calabria on the Italian mainland?

The Strait of Messina. Its rocks and whirlpools so alarmed ancient sailors that tradition placed Scylla and Charybdis here, the twin monsters Odysseus had to steer between.

Which Greek monster did Zeus trap beneath Sicily's great volcano, according to myth?

Typhon. In one telling Zeus hurled the mountain on top of the fleeing monster, and its eruptions were said to be Typhon still raging underneath.

Sicily's volcanoes are linked to the Eurasian Plate colliding with which other tectonic plate?

The African Plate. It is sliding beneath the Eurasian Plate here, and the collision that raised Sicily out of the sea still drives the island's eruptions and earthquakes.

Sicily's 48.8 °C reading in August 2021 broke a European heat record held since 1977 by which capital city?

Athens. Its 48.0 °C from July 1977 stood for 44 years, and the World Meteorological Organization did not confirm the Sicilian reading as the new record until January 2024.

Sicily's 'Hundred Horse' tree, said to have sheltered a queen and her hundred knights in a storm, is what kind of tree?

Chestnut tree. Guinness lists it for the greatest tree girth ever recorded, almost 58 metres in 1780, though it has since split into separate trunks.

Which animal, found only in Sicily, was hunted to extinction on the island in the 20th century?

A wolf subspecies. The Sicilian wolf was smaller and paler than its mainland cousins; the last known one was shot in 1924, and scientists only named it as a subspecies in 2018.

Which Greek colony grew into the most powerful city of ancient Sicily?

Syracuse. Settlers from Corinth founded it around 734 BC, and in 413 BC it destroyed the entire army and fleet that Athens had sent to conquer it.

Which mathematician helped defend his Sicilian home city and was killed when Rome captured it in 212 BC?

Archimedes. His war machines kept the Roman army out through a long siege, and when the walls finally fell a soldier killed him against the general's express orders.

Sicily became Rome's earliest province outside the Italian peninsula after which war?

The First Punic War. Rome and Carthage fought over the island for 23 years, and Rome, until then a land power, had to build a war fleet from scratch to win.

Which Roman orator made his name in 70 BC by prosecuting Verres, the governor who had plundered Sicily?

Cicero. He had served in Sicily as a junior official, so the islanders asked him to take the case, and his opening speech was so damaging that Verres fled into exile.

Which of the three 'vals' of Arab-ruled Sicily covered the west of the island?

Val di Mazara. It was named after Mazara, the south-western port where the Arab invasion fleet landed in 827, and it was the first third of the island to fall.

The extinct Siculo-Arabic spoken in Sicily developed into which modern language?

Maltese. Settlers carried Sicilian Arabic to Malta, where it lived on after dying out at home, and it is now the only Semitic language among the European Union's official languages.

Which crops did Muslim rule introduce to Sicily?

Lemons, oranges and pistachios all arrived under Arab rule, along with sugar cane, cotton and the irrigation methods that turned dry land into orchards.

The Norman conquest of Sicily ended in 1091 when which town in the far south-east, the last Arab stronghold, fell?

Noto. It yielded in February 1091, thirty years after a Sicilian emir at war with a rival had invited the Normans across the strait as his allies.

Which Norman ruler raised Sicily to a kingdom in 1130?

Roger II. He had the Arab geographer al-Idrisi spend years making a great silver map of the world and an atlas to explain it, finished in 1154 and known as the Book of Roger.

Which Hohenstaufen emperor, later called 'the wonder of the world', was crowned King of Sicily in 1198 aged three?

Frederick II. He later went on crusade while excommunicated by the pope and won back Jerusalem in 1229 without a battle, by striking a deal with the sultan.

The poets of the Sicilian School at the Hohenstaufen court are credited with inventing which verse form?

The sonnet. The credit goes to Giacomo da Lentini, a court notary Dante simply called 'the Notary'; the form then crossed to the mainland, where Petrarch made it famous.

The 1282 uprising that drove the French from Sicily is known by what name?

The Sicilian Vespers. The revolt broke out at the hour of vespers, the evening service, on Easter Monday, reportedly after a French soldier harassed a Sicilian woman outside a church.

Which disease reached Europe in October 1347 aboard twelve Genoese galleys that docked at a Sicilian port?

Plague. Most of the sailors were dead or dying when the ships tied up, and although officials ordered the fleet back out to sea, the Black Death was already ashore.

The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 handed Sicily for just seven years to which royal house, later the kings of Italy?

Savoy. The island gave Duke Victor Amadeus II his family's first royal crown, and although he had to trade it for Sardinia in 1720, the title of king stayed.

Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand began its conquest of Sicily in 1860 by landing at which town?

Marsala. Two British warships happened to be in the harbour, and Garibaldi wrote that they made the Bourbon gunners hesitate until his men were almost all ashore.

What was the code name for the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943?

Operation Husky. To draw German troops away first, British intelligence floated a corpse dressed as an officer onto a Spanish beach, carrying fake plans to invade Greece.

Which 'Iron Prefect' did Mussolini send to Sicily in the 1920s to crush the Mafia?

Cesare Mori. He opened 1926 by laying siege to the hill town of Gangi to flush out fugitives, yet the Mafia reasserted itself once Fascism fell in 1943.

Italy granted Sicily its special statute in May 1946, weeks before becoming a republic, to defuse what?

An armed independence movement. The separatists had raised a clandestine army, but once the royal decree granted self-rule their cause drained away, and within a few years the movement had faded from the island's politics.

Which Sicilian site near Piazza Armerina holds what UNESCO calls the finest ancient mosaics still in place anywhere?

Villa Romana del Casale. A landslide buried the villa in the 12th century, and that covering is why its 4th-century floors stayed almost intact until excavation 700 years later.

The Valley of the Temples, one of Sicily's UNESCO sites, is located at which city?

Agrigento. Despite the name, the temples line a ridge, not a valley, and the best preserved, the Temple of Concordia, owes its survival to being turned into a church in 597.

Which UNESCO listing covers eight Sicilian communities rebuilt after the 1693 earthquake?

Late Baroque Towns of the Val di Noto. Noto itself was not repaired: the ruins were abandoned and a new Noto rose about 8 km away on lower ground, planned from scratch.

The volcanic islands north of Sicily, including Stromboli and Lipari, are named after which mythical Greek figure?

Aeolus, demigod of the winds. They are the Aeolian Islands, and in the Odyssey he gives Odysseus a bag holding every contrary wind, which the crew open within sight of home.

The Teatro Massimo in Sicily's capital holds what distinction?

Largest opera house in Italy. It closed in 1974 for repairs meant to be brief and stayed shut for 23 years, reopening in 1997 just days before its hundredth birthday.

Which composer of Norma was born in Catania?

Vincenzo Bellini. His home city named its opera house after him, and its signature aubergine pasta is called alla Norma, by legend because a local poet hailed it as a masterpiece to match the opera.

Which Sicilian writer created Inspector Salvo Montalbano?

Andrea Camilleri. He was 68 when the first Montalbano novel appeared, and the series drew so many visitors that his home town, Porto Empedocle, added the fictional name Vigata to its own from 2003 to 2009.

Which Albanian-descended language is spoken in four towns in north-west Sicily?

Arbëresh. Its speakers descend from Albanians who fled the Ottoman advance in the 15th and 16th centuries, and Piana degli Albanesi still posts its road signs in both languages.

Which body was discovered from an observatory in Sicily's capital on 1 January 1801?

Ceres. Giuseppe Piazzi named it for the Roman goddess of grain, then lost it behind the Sun within weeks; it was found again only because Gauss, aged 24, calculated where to look.

The Ettore Majorana centre in Erice was founded in the early 1960s by which Sicilian-born physicist?

Antonino Zichichi. He housed it in restored monasteries, and in 1982 he drafted the Erice Statement there with Paul Dirac and Pyotr Kapitsa, urging scientists to work for peace.

What is the filling of a traditional cannolo usually based on?

Ricotta. The pastry takes its name from canna, the river reed once cut into sections to shape the shells for frying, and it began as a treat made only at Carnival.

Which philosopher mocked Mithaecus of Sicily, who wrote the earliest known Greek cookbook in the 5th century BC?

Plato. His Gorgias gives the author of the Sicilian cookery book an unflattering mention; one recipe survives, a single line on slicing a ribbon fish with cheese and oil, and Sparta reportedly expelled him as too indulgent.

Which is Sicily's best-known native red grape variety?

Nero d'Avola. The name means 'black of Avola', a town in the south-east, yet for decades the grape was a hidden blender, used to add colour and body to paler wines from mainland Italy.

Which town in western Sicily is known for couscous, a sign of North African influence?

Trapani. North Africa usually serves couscous with lamb and vegetables, but here it comes in a spicy fish broth, and nearby San Vito Lo Capo holds an international couscous festival every September.

Which Sicilian footballer won the Golden Boot at the 1990 World Cup?

Salvatore Schillaci. He took the last place in Italy's squad and began the tournament on the bench, then scored six goals and also won the Golden Ball as the World Cup's best player.

Which sports car race ran through the Madonie Mountains from 1906 until 1977?

Targa Florio. The course was ordinary public mountain road, 72 km a lap with hundreds of corners; after the speed race stopped in 1977 on safety grounds, a rally took over the name and the edition count.

The Opera dei Pupi, on UNESCO's Intangible Heritage list, is what kind of performance?

Marionette puppet theatre. The puppeteers largely improvised the dialogue, spinning tales of medieval knights out over several evenings, and the armoured figures are worked from above with metal rods.

Whose head appears at the centre of the triskelion on the Sicilian flag?

Medusa. The wheat ears around her stand for the island's fertility, and although the banner goes back to a 13th-century revolt, it became the region's official flag only in January 2000.

Catania's electronics industry cluster is nicknamed what, in homage to a famous Californian region?

Etna Valley. The cluster grew up around the chip maker STMicroelectronics, on site since the 1960s, and in 2024 the firm announced a new silicon carbide plant there costing about 5 billion euros.

Whose sailors dug survivors from a Sicilian city wrecked by the 1908 earthquake and are still honoured there with a monument?

Russia. Minutes after the shock a tsunami up to twelve metres high swept the shore; sailors from Russian and British warships joined the rescue, and the rebuilt city named a square after the Russians.

Which Sicilian port is the busiest passenger port in Italy, thanks to its ferries to the mainland?

Messina. In 2024 it was the busiest passenger port in the whole European Union, not just Italy, because its short crossing to Calabria carries cars, lorries and even mainline railway carriages.

Which Byzantine commander rebelled in 826, reportedly after being ordered punished for forcing a nun to marry him?

Euphemius. Driven off the island, he offered the Aghlabid emir in North Africa tribute in return for an army, only to be pushed aside by his new allies and killed while negotiating a surrender at Enna.