Europe’s tallest active volcano crowns a triangular island
Sicily, Italy’s largest island and a full region, holds over 4.7 million people—about 1.2 million around Palermo. Mount Etna, currently about 3,403 metres high, is Europe’s tallest active volcano and among the world’s busiest. The island’s name recalls the Iron Age Sicels of the east.
Epigravettian hunter-gatherers reached the island near the end of the last ice age, about sixteen thousand years ago, with activity recorded by around 14,000 BCE. Dolmens from the second half of the third millennium BC show influences arriving both from north-western Europe and from the eastern Mediterranean. An extinct dwarf elephant, Palaeoloxodon falconeri, once lived on Sicily and Malta.
Three peoples held the island in classical times. The Sicani came first, from Iberia according to Thucydides, though some scholars think them Illyrian, and left cave art dated to around 8000 BC. The Elymians, probably from the Aegean, settled the north-west and the Sicani shifted east; then around 1200 BC the Sicels, thought to originate in Liguria, crossed from mainland Italy and pushed the Sicani into the interior, giving the island its name.
Phoenician posts in the west came before the Greeks, who began settling around 750 BC and founded Syracuse, Akragas, Selinunte, Gela, Himera and Zancle. Local peoples absorbed Greek culture readily, olives and vines brought profitable trade, and temples such as those in Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples rose across Magna Graecia’s Sicilian share. Carthage and the Greek cities fought the Sicilian Wars from 580 to 265 BCE.
Rome made the island its province of Sicilia in 241 BCE, and Greeks also called it Trinacria after its three headlands. Normans created the County of Sicily in 1071 and a kingdom in 1130, and after the Vespers uprising of 1282 Aragonese and then Spanish rulers held it for centuries.
Source: Sicily
