Sicily

Sicily (Italian and Sicilian: Sicilia), officially the Sicilian Region (Italian: Regione Siciliana; Sicilian: Riggiuni Siciliana), is an island in the central Mediterranean Sea and one of the twenty regions of Italy, situated south of the Italian Peninsula in continental Europe. With 4.7 million inhabitants, including 1.2 million in and around the capital city of Palermo, it is both the largest and most populous island in the Mediterranean Sea.

Sicily is named after the Sicels, who inhabited the eastern part of the island during the Iron Age. Sicily has a rich and unique culture in arts, music, literature, cuisine, and architecture. Its most prominent landmark is Mount Etna, the tallest active volcano in Europe, and one of the most active in the world, currently 3,403 m (11,165 ft) high. The island has a typical Mediterranean climate. It is separated from Calabria by the Strait of Messina. It is one of the five Italian autonomous regions and is generally considered part of Southern Italy.

The earliest archaeological record of human activity on the island dates to around 14,000 BC. By around 750 BC, Sicily had three Phoenician and around twelve Greek colonies along its coasts, becoming one of the centers of Magna Graecia. The Sicilian Wars of 580–265 BC were fought between the Carthaginians and Greeks, and the Punic Wars of 264–146 BC were fought between Rome and Carthage. The Roman province of Sicilia ended with the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century AD. Sicily was ruled during the Early Middle Ages by the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantine Empire, and the Emirate of Sicily.

The Norman conquest of southern Italy led to the creation of the County of Sicily in 1071, which was succeeded by the Kingdom of Sicily in 1130. Following the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, Sicily was ruled by Aragon and then Spain, either in personal union with the crown or by a cadet branch, except for a brief period of Savoy and then Habsburg rule in 1713–1735. In 1816, the kingdom unified with the Kingdom of Naples to form the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Following the Expedition of the Thousand, an invasion led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, and a subsequent plebiscite, the island became part of the newly unified Italy in 1860. Sicily was given special status as an autonomous administrative division on 15 May 1946, 18 days before the 1946 Italian institutional referendum.

The name Sicilia was given to the Roman province in 241 BC. It is named after the Sicels, who inhabited the eastern part of the island during the Iron Age. The ancient name of the island is Trinacria (Greek Τρινακρία "having three headlands") for its triangular shape, likely a re-interpretation of earlier (Homeric) Thrinacia. The Greek name was rendered as Trīnācrĭa in classical Latin (Virgil, Ovid).

Humans first colonized Sicily towards the end of the Late Pleistocene, around 16,000 years ago, by people associated with the Epigravettian culture.

Discoveries of dolmens on the island (dating to the second half of the third millennium BC) seem to offer new insights into the culture of primitive Sicily. The impact of at least two influences is clear: the European one coming from the Northwest, and the Mediterranean influence of an eastern heritage.

The original classical-era inhabitants of Sicily comprised three defined groups of the ancient peoples of Italy: the Sicani, the Elymians and the Sicels. The most prominent and by far the earliest of these were the Sicani, who (Thucydides writes) arrived from the Iberian Peninsula (perhaps Catalonia). Some modern scholars, however, suggest classifying the Sicani as possibly an Illyrian tribe. Important historical evidence has been discovered in the form of cave drawings by the Sicani, dated from the end of the Pleistocene epoch around 8000 BC. The Elymians, thought to have come from the area of the Aegean Sea, became the next tribe to join the Sicanians on Sicily.