The Golden Book of Sicily [antikvár]

Panorama of the city. PALERMO Historical Note:- A large and important city, Palermo opens like a fan out of its picturesque roadstead; above it stand harsh and powerful hills which descend in steps toward the green Conca d'Oro. In spite of the massive invasion of cement over recent decades, the 'Golden Shell' still offers as a whole a spectacular and evocative landscape. First the Sicanians, then the Cretans and Elymians, founded their colonies beside the bay. The Phoenicians were also strongly attracted to the place, and it became a permanent Phoenician colony in the eighth century B.C. Between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C. a new fortified city grew up around the original nucleus of the Palaeopolis and that of the more recently developed Neapolis. The Syracusans made several unsuccessful attempts to take the new city at the time of the wars against the Carthaginians. After a fruitless siege in 258 B.C., the stronghold of the Carthiginians in Sicily was forced to yield to the Romans in 254 B.C.; four years later the Romans resisted Has-drubal's attempt to reconquer it. When Roman power declined, between the sixth and ninth centuries, Palermo fell into the hands of barbarian peoples (Vandals, Ostrogoths), who remained in power there in turn until the Byzantines took over in the first half of the sixth century, to be turned out themselves by the Arabs in 831. At the beginning of the eleventh century a combined military invasion by Normans and Pisans undermined the Arab occupation; the Arabs had given way to the Normans of Robert Guiscard and Roger by 1072. From that date till the last twenty years of the twelfth century the stage was held by the rise and fall of the Normans, who spread out from Palermo all over Sicily, promoting science, culture and the arts. When the Normans declined it was the turn of the Swabians; Frederick II was a great figure on the stage of history, a ruler who attracted the most talented and innovative men of the time, in spite of the combined opposition to him of nobles and papacy. When Frederick died (1250), the city declined inexorably until finally tlie capital was transferred to Naples (1266); the Angevins and Aragonese took their turns as rulers in Palermo. The brief interiude of the Vespers (1282) only consolidated the power of the Aragonese, which was a prelude to the long-lasting dominion of the Spanish in Palermo and on the island. Between the sbiteenth and seventeenth centuries, the city changed its face again; new fortifications were built and the layout of the town changed substantially. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the Savoys and the Austrians ruled until the advent of Charles III, who built his fortune on the foundation of arrogant abuses of power by clergy and nobility. In the second half of the eighteenth century the Spanish viceroy Caracciolo carried out a series of reforms of which the most striking was the suppression of the tribunal of the Holy Office. As a result of the French Revolution and widespread unrest in the island, the Bourbon rulers introduced a constitution in 1812; this, however, did not contain the revolutionary unrest and a fertile terrain was prepared for the victorious enterprise of Garibaldi (1860).