50 Fun Facts About Sicily

Which city is the capital of Sicily?

About 1.2 million of the island's 4.7 million people live in and around it.

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

The Sicani were there first, arriving (according to Thucydides) from the Iberian Peninsula.

What was the ancient Greek name for Sicily, referring to its three headlands?

The three-legged triskelion on the modern flag still stands for those three capes.

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

It stood 3,403 metres high as of 2024, roughly two and a half times the height of Vesuvius.

What separates Sicily from Calabria on the Italian mainland?

It narrows to about 3 km at its northern end, and a record suspension bridge across it is now planned for 2032.

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

Its recurrent eruptions still cast black ash across the island.

Sicily's volcanoes are explained by the island sitting on the northern edge of which tectonic feature?

The Aeolian Islands to the north-east form a second volcanic complex including Stromboli.

What temperature, a European record, was recorded in south-east Sicily on 11 August 2021?

The unofficial 48.5 °C reading at Catenanuova in 1999 had long been the island's benchmark.

The Castagno dei Cento Cavalli on Etna is claimed as the world's largest and oldest known what?

It is thought to be somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 years old.

Which endemic animal was driven to extinction on the island in the 20th century?

Roe deer had already vanished from the island; a dwarf elephant lived there until about 20,000 years ago.

Which was the most important Greek colony in Sicily?

Athens sent its disastrous Sicilian Expedition against it in 415-413 BC and lost an entire army and fleet.

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

He is one of the reasons Sicily is called part of Magna Graecia rather than an outpost of it.

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

Syracuse held out as an ally until it switched sides in the next war and was besieged.

Which Roman orator's speeches against the corrupt governor Verres were delivered in 70 BC?

The In Verrem orations were prompted by Sicily's sharp decline during Verres's three years in charge.

Under Arab rule the island was divided into three 'vals'. Which one covered the west?

Val Demone in the north-east stayed largely Christian and rebellious throughout the emirate.

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

Ibn Hawqal, an Arab merchant who visited Palermo in 950, counted 7,000 butchers in the city.

Which crops did Muslim rule introduce to Sicily?

They also brought sugar cane, cotton and mulberries for silk, plus the qanat irrigation system.

The Norman conquest of Sicily was completed in 1091 with the capture of which last Arab stronghold?

Roger I had landed at Messina in 1061 with just 700 knights; the decisive moment was the fall of the capital in 1071.

Which Norman ruler raised Sicily to a kingdom in 1130?

His court was reckoned wealthier than the Kingdom of England and issued laws in Arabic, Greek and Latin as needed.

Which Hohenstaufen emperor was crowned King of Sicily in 1198 aged four?

He grew up running the streets of Palermo, picking up Arabic and Greek, and dismissed the papal regent at twelve.

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

Giacomo da Lentini gets the credit; the group wrote more than 300 courtly love poems between 1230 and 1266.

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

Sicilians then turned to Peter III of Aragon, and the island stayed in Aragonese and Spanish hands for centuries.

The Black Death first arrived in Europe in October 1347 at which Sicilian port?

The same city was flattened by an earthquake in 1908 that killed more than 80,000 people.

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

They swapped it for Sardinia with the Austrian emperor Charles VI.

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

The same town gives its name to Sicily's famous fortified wine.

On what date did the Allied invasion of Sicily begin during the Second World War?

The landings helped trigger the 25 July crisis that toppled Mussolini.

Which fascist-era 'Iron Prefect' led the first successful campaign against the Mafia?

Falcone and Borsellino led the next big campaign in the 1980s.

Sicily is one of how many autonomous regions of Italy?

It was given special status on 15 May 1946, eighteen days before the referendum that made Italy a republic.

Which Sicilian region contains the richest and largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world?

The 4th-century villa sits about 3 km outside Piazza Armerina and became a World Heritage Site in 1997.

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

The Greeks knew the city as Akragas.

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

They were rebuilt in the new style after the earthquake of 1693 killed some 60,000 people.

The Aeolian Islands are named after which figure of Greek myth?

The volcanic archipelago draws up to 200,000 visitors a year.

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

It is the third largest in Europe; Catania's Teatro Massimo Bellini is prized for its acoustics.

Which composer of Norma was born in Catania?

Catania's opera house is named for him.

Which Sicilian writer created Inspector Salvo Montalbano?

Sicily has produced two Nobel laureates in literature: Pirandello in 1934 and Salvatore Quasimodo in 1959.

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

The Arbëreshë fled the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the 15th and 16th centuries.

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

Giuseppe Piazzi's find is now classed as a dwarf planet.

The Ettore Majorana centre in Erice was founded by which physicist?

Majorana, the Sicilian theorist it honours, gave his name to the Majorana equation and Majorana fermions.

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

The tube-shaped fried pastry shell is Sicily's most famous sweet worldwide.

The 5th-century BC Sicilian cook Mithaecus is notable as the earliest what?

His cookbook was the first written in Greek.

Which is Sicily's best-known native red grape variety, named for a small town in the south-east?

Sicily is Italy's third-largest wine region after Veneto and Emilia-Romagna.

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

Ragusa, by contrast, is famous for honey and Modica chocolate.

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

No Sicilian club has ever won Serie A, though Palermo has played 29 seasons in it.

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

It was founded by the industrialist Vincenzo Florio and stopped on safety grounds.

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

The puppets act out Frankish romances such as the Song of Roland and Orlando furioso.

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

The three wheat ears around it stand for the island's fertility; the red and yellow are for Palermo and Corleone.

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

STMicroelectronics is among the international firms with offices and factories in the Catania Industrial District.

The earthquake that struck north-east Sicily on 28 December 1908 killed roughly how many people?

Eastern Sicily had already been devastated by earthquakes in 1542 and 1693, the latter prompting the Baroque rebuilding of the Val di Noto.

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

Its routes run to Villa San Giovanni and Salerno; a proposed 3.6 km suspension bridge would span the strait by 2032.

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

His revolt opened the door to the Muslim conquest, which took over a century; Syracuse held out until 878 and Taormina until 902.