Sicily [antikvár]

In Sicily there is no escape from history: it is the reason tourists go there and one reason why so many Sicilians have had to emigrate in search of work. Twenty-five centuries of turbulent events have created a priceless collection of monuments. A long succession of different peoples came here as conquerors, and most of them left a permanent mark on the mixed genetic structure of the population. More interestingly, they were responsible for the confusion (rather than fusion), which everywhere stamps its present-day material and spiritual culture.Sicily's history has for the most part been one of constantly repeated violence, most of it man-made, but much also deriving from the frightful and uncontrollable influence of a volcanic terrain. Yet it and its people have made major contributions to European civilization, and no visitor can fail to be amazed by the riches it has to offer.Sicily is an island, and perhaps no other Island anywhere has had a greater role in history. Moreover, it is a comparatively small island, less than half the size of Ireland. If it nevertheless has played such a prominent part in history, that is above all because of its location in the mid-Mediterranean, which was for centuries the geographic (renter of the civilized world. Often it has been the most obvious meeting place between Europe and Africa, between the East and West.It has also been an island of great wealth or at least of potential wealth. For many years it possessed a virtual world-monopoly of sulphur production, at a time when sulphur and sulphuric acid were vital commodities for Europe's industrial revolution. For a while it had almost no competitor in the growing of citrus fruit and sugar cane. Its agriculture can even today produce substantial revenues provided there is adequate irrigation; and in past times, when wealth was measured in very much smaller figures than today, Sicily ranked as one of the major agricultural regions of the world. It was 110 idle boast of the Greek tyrant Gelon to offer to feed from Sicily the entire Greek army during the Persian wars. Some two centuries later, when the Romans took the island as their first province, they knew that, apart from its great strategic importance, it produced enough food to become the granary of great Rome itself.Already in the Stone and Bronze Ages, Sicily was a goal for migrations and a meeting place of cultural influences. Partly because of its coveted wealth, partly because of its strategic position along the great trade routes, it remained an object of ambitious desire, and the result was that other peoples regularly fought out their battles for world domination 011 Sicilian soil. This was always a major disaster, but sometimes also carried an incidental benctlt. The Semitic-speaking Phoenicians