Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History

It is Gagliardi’s S. Giorgio that is the ultimate showstopper—for many of us the most beautiful baroque church in Sicily, in one of the loveliest and most remote corners of the island.

Phoenicians and Greeks, Carthaginians and Romans, Goths and Byzantines, Arabs and Normans, Germans, Spaniards and French, all have left their mark on her.

Finally, the cathedral of Syracuse, one of the only cathedrals to have been built five centuries before the birth of Christ.

And so the legend of the Barbary Coast was born.

Those ancient columns, however, survived all their tribulations, and still stand to prove once again that most curious of historical-religious phenomena: that once a place is recognized as holy, then, regardless of all changes in the prevailing faith, holy it remains.

Magna Graecia, as it was called, was never a nation or an empire in the sense that Rome was to be. Politically, it was simply composed of a number of small city-states; by 500 B.C. there were some 1,500 of them, extending from the Black Sea to the coast of Catalonia.

It lacks the gemlike perfection of the Palatine Chapel, the Byzantine mystery of the Martorana, or the sheer magic that streams down from the great Pantocrator at Cefalù.

He was not an architect but a worker in stucco, and his name was Giacomo Serpotta.

Built in the first quarter of the fourth century, few of its walls remain; what takes the breath away is the quality and quantity of the superb floor mosaics, which cover some 3,500 square meters.

Three piazzas were built along the main street, each with a church on the higher side. The result is the most beautiful city in Sicily, made lovelier still by its glorious honey-colored stone, which seems to absorb and then radiate the almost constant sunshine. The cathedral is probably the most spectacular of the ecclesiastical buildings, thanks largely to the tremendous flight of steps which leads up to it; it is one of the latest of the great buildings of the city, having been completed only in 1770.

Dante consigns Dionysius—somewhat unfairly—to the seventh circle of hell, where he is immersed in the Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood and fire.

Only a quarter of a century after the end of the second revolt, Sicily received its new Governor, Gaius Licinius Verres.

In fact, from first to last it took thirty-one years—in notable contrast to the Norman conquest of England just six years later, which mopped up the Saxon opposition in a matter of months.

As for Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, he is for me in a class by himself.

Dionysius I of Syracuse ruled for no fewer than thirty-eight years, a period of tyranny that Diodorus describes as “the strongest and longest of any in recorded history.”

Finally Theodoric laid aside the skins and furs that were the traditional clothing of his race, robed himself—as Odoacer never had—in the imperial purple and settled down to rule in Italy.

Thus it was that Roger of Sicily had become, by the last decade of the eleventh century, the greatest prince of the south, more powerful than any ruler on the Italian mainland, the Pope included.

It is the misfortune of nearly all despots and dictators that they hardly ever pass on their strength to their successors.

Whatever the truth may be, a peace treaty was duly signed; and this treaty marked the first recognition by Syracuse of a Carthaginian province in Sicily. The Carthaginian settlements, all in the far west of the island, were to be the absolute property of Carthage.

They are Noto, Ragusa and Modica, all three in the far southeast of the island.