Sicily Trivia
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50 free Sicily trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sicily trivia for anyone who has stood on the slopes of Etna, eaten a cannolo in Palermo, watched The Leopard or Cinema Paradiso, or traced their family back to the island. The quiz begins with geography: the triangle the Greeks called Trinacria, the Strait of Messina, the volcanoes, the record-setting heat, and the mountains that are really the tail of the Apennines. Then it moves through three thousand years of arrivals. Sicels and Elymians, Phoenicians and Greeks, Archimedes defending Syracuse against Rome, Arab emirs who brought lemons and pistachios, Norman kings whose court outshone England, Frederick II and his poets, the Vespers uprising, Aragon and Spain, Garibaldi landing at Marsala, and the twentieth-century fight against the Mafia. It finishes with the culture: the puppet theatre, the painted carts, Bellini and the Teatro Massimo, Pirandello and Camilleri, Nero d'Avola and Marsala, and the Medusa-headed triskelion on the flag. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Italy, Rome, ancient Greece and volcano quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which city is the capital of Sicily?
Palermo
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.
Q 02Sicily takes its name from which Iron Age people who lived in the east of the island?
The Sicels
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.
Q 03Which ancient Greek name for Sicily describes the island's shape?
Trinacria
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.
Q 04What is Sicily's most prominent landmark and Europe's tallest active volcano?
Mount Etna
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.
Q 05What separates Sicily from Calabria on the Italian mainland?
The Strait of Messina
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.
Q 06Which Greek monster did Zeus trap beneath Sicily's great volcano, according to myth?
Typhon
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.
Q 07Sicily's volcanoes are linked to the Eurasian Plate colliding with which other tectonic plate?
The African 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.
Q 08Sicily's 48.8 °C reading in August 2021 broke a European heat record held since 1977 by which capital city?
Athens
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.
Q 09Sicily's 'Hundred Horse' tree, said to have sheltered a queen and her hundred knights in a storm, is what kind of tree?
Chestnut 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.
Q 10Which animal, found only in Sicily, was hunted to extinction on the island in the 20th century?
A wolf subspecies
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.
Q 11Which Greek colony grew into the most powerful city of ancient Sicily?
Syracuse
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.
Q 12Which mathematician helped defend his Sicilian home city and was killed when Rome captured it in 212 BC?
Archimedes
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.
Q 13Sicily became Rome's earliest province outside the Italian peninsula after which war?
The First Punic 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.
Q 21The poets of the Sicilian School at the Hohenstaufen court are credited with inventing which verse form?
The sonnet
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.
Q 22The 1282 uprising that drove the French from Sicily is known by what name?
The Sicilian Vespers
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.
Q 23Which disease reached Europe in October 1347 aboard twelve Genoese galleys that docked at a Sicilian port?
Plague
Q 14Which Roman orator made his name in 70 BC by prosecuting Verres, the governor who had plundered Sicily?
Cicero
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.
Q 15Which of the three 'vals' of Arab-ruled Sicily covered the west of the island?
Val di Mazara
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.
Q 16The extinct Siculo-Arabic spoken in Sicily developed into which modern language?
Maltese
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.
Q 17Which crops did Muslim rule introduce to Sicily?
Lemons, oranges and pistachios
Lemons, oranges and pistachios all arrived under Arab rule, along with sugar cane, cotton and the irrigation methods that turned dry land into orchards.
Q 18The Norman conquest of Sicily ended in 1091 when which town in the far south-east, the last Arab stronghold, fell?
Noto
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.
Q 19Which Norman ruler raised Sicily to a kingdom in 1130?
Roger II
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.
Q 20Which Hohenstaufen emperor, later called 'the wonder of the world', was crowned King of Sicily in 1198 aged three?
Frederick II
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.
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.
Q 24The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 handed Sicily for just seven years to which royal house, later the kings of Italy?
Savoy
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.
Q 25Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand began its conquest of Sicily in 1860 by landing at which town?
Marsala
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.
Q 26What was the code name for the Allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943?
Operation Husky
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.
Q 27Which 'Iron Prefect' did Mussolini send to Sicily in the 1920s to crush the Mafia?
Cesare Mori
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.
Q 28Italy granted Sicily its special statute in May 1946, weeks before becoming a republic, to defuse what?
An armed independence movement
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.
Q 29Which Sicilian site near Piazza Armerina holds what UNESCO calls the finest ancient mosaics still in place anywhere?
Villa Romana del Casale
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.
Q 30The Valley of the Temples, one of Sicily's UNESCO sites, is located at which city?
Agrigento
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.