Phoenician Sis became Sicily’s 2,700-year cultural capital
Palermo, Sicily’s capital on a Tyrrhenian gulf, is a roughly 2,700-year-old city of layered architecture and foodways. Phoenicians founded Sis (“flower”) in 734 BCE; Carthage, Greek Panormos, and Roman Panormus followed. The municipality holds about 626,000 people (2026), with a metro near 1.2 million.
Palermo, Palermu in Sicilian, is the capital and largest city of Sicily's autonomous region, set on its own gulf opening onto the Tyrrhenian Sea. Some 2,700 years of settlement have left it famed for history, culture, buildings and cooking. The municipality counted 626,273 people in 2026; Eurostat puts the urban area at 855,285, and the metropolitan city, around 1.2 million, is Italy's fifth largest. Residents, called Palermitani or poetically panormiti, speak Italian and the Palermitano dialect of Sicilian.
Cave drawings at nearby Addaura show people here in the Mesolithic, perhaps by 8000 BC, and the first known inhabitants were Sicani, whom Thucydides said came from Iberia, possibly Catalonia. Phoenicians settled the natural harbour in 734 BC, naming it Sis or Ziz, "flower", one of their three chief Sicilian colonies alongside Motya and Soluntum. The original Paleapolis linked to the hills by roads now called Via Cappuccini and Corso Pisani, while a Neapolis between it and the port soon outgrew it, filling with markets and workshops. Walls with four gates traced the Kemonia and Papireto rivers as a natural moat and were strengthened under Rome.
Carthage took the town, and two Greek colonies together called Panormos supplied a name that appeared on Carthaginian coins after the 5th century BC. As Panormus it belonged to Rome for over a thousand years. Arab rule from 831 to 1072 under the Emirate of Sicily made the city, then called Balarm, the island's capital for the first time, and after the Norman conquest it headed the Kingdom of Sicily from 1130 to 1816.
Today Palermo is Sicily's cultural, economic and tourism capital and its main industrial and commercial centre, resting on tourism, services, commerce and agriculture, with an international airport and a sizeable underground economy. Visitors come for the climate, food and nightlife and for Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque and Art Nouveau churches and palaces; the city also holds most of the UNESCO-listed Arab-Norman monuments, a site shared with the cathedrals of Cefalù and Monreale. Catholic life centres on patron Santa Rosalia, honoured on 15 July, and the Vucciria, Ballarò and Capo markets overflow with fruit, vegetables and fish.
Source: Palermo
