Palermo is the capital of Sicily and the fifth largest city in Italy (660,460 inhabitants, and over a million if we include the suburbs). In the middle of the Mediterranean sea, Palermo - the cradle of ancient civilizations - has always been a crossroads of cultures between East and West: a strategic transit place, a privileged port of call for commerce and trade, a landing-place for people of various race, language, and religion. Palermo has always enchanted visitors and foreigners alike with the charm of its location, the mildness of its climate, and the splendour of its buildings. And for these same reasons it has, over the centuries, been dominated by a succession of different rulers.

Palermo is one of the few cities in the world that have preserved considerable traces of the culture of their successive conquerors: from the Romans to the Byzantines, from the Arabs to the Normans, from the Swabians to the French, from the Spaniards to the Austrians, they have all left unmistakable marks of their passing; and these are invaluable testimonies, since this convergence of different styles and shapes, from the North of Europe to Africa, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque period, has given birth to a variety of absolutely original artistic, architectural, and decorative creations.

Palermo is also characterized by the fact that, despite its mixture of different cultures, the city has maintained its identity as a capital city which at all times has succeeded in combining the best of what other nations could offer with its own people’s vocation for freedom.

Conquered by the Romans in 254 BC, Palermo was a free, thriving, and active city for many long years. In the mid-5th century AD, when the Barbarians invaded Italy and Sicily, the city was sacked by the Vandals and then occupied by the Ostrogoths, until it fell under the sway of the Byzantine Empire after an expedition led by Belisarius. This led to a period of comparative peace and security for Palermo that lasted some three centuries (535-831), during which time the Church increased its authority.

In 881, following a series of raids by pirates from the Barbary Coast, the Arab Empire began to expand, and most of Sicily found itself occupied. Palermo began to play a leading role in the Mediterranean area. It welcomed foreigners from many different countries, multiplying the number of its inhabitants (reaching a population of 300,000) and developing its industries and trades (with merchants from Genoa, Amalfi, Pisa, and Venice opening up warehouses). Palermo eventually became a prime centre of culture and learning (the culture of the Arab world played an important role in the Europe of the day), and hundreds of mosques, palaces, and gardens were built all over the city. The town layout was renovated - since then, and therefore for almost a millennium, this has in fact remained practically unchanged. It was described by geographers and celebrated in verse by poets. It was called ziz, “the splendid one”: it was a period of wealth and magnificence, the like of which Palermo will probably never see again.

The arrival of the Normans, a young and vigorous population originally coming from the north of France, dealt the final blow to the decline of Muslim political and military power. In 1072 Great Count Roger of Hauteville and his cousin Robert Guiscard captured Palermo after a five-month siege and conquered the rest of Sicily in a matter of years. The new rulers cultivated trade and commerce and established a strong feudal regime. In 1130 Roger II, the Great Count’s son, was crowned king of Sicily, with the Pope’s approval. The Normans were as farsighted as the Arabs and remained on good terms with their vanquished foe: well aware of the Arabs’ cultural superiority, they used Arab (and Byzantine) architects and craftsmen to build and decorate their magnificent palaces and churches, on the sites of the city’s numerous mosques. This was the driving force behind the creation of such absolute masterpieces as the Palatine Chapel, Monreale Cathedral, the Zisa Palace, the Cuba Palace, and Maredolce Castle in the vast Genoardo park.

With the Pope’s approval, Charles of Anjou became the new ruler of Sicily, establishing an oppressive regime and moving the power centre to Naples. In 1282 the people of Palermo rose in revolt and drove the French out, in the rebellion known as the War of the Sicilian Vespers, which was to drag on for some twenty years. In the meanwhile, the nobles sought the support of the powerful kings of Aragon. Sicily fell increasingly under the sway of Spain, at first as a vassal kingdom, while the great feudal Sicilian families fought each other and took advantage of the absence of the Aragonese. This was a period of anarchy and decline, during which all trade languished in the Mediterranean area. Palermo - dominated by the Chiaramonte family, which held off the Catalan nobles and the power of the king himself - went through a protracted social and economic crisis. Following the suppression of the barons’ revolts by the Aragonese, the first Spanish Viceroy arrived in Palermo, in 1415. From that moment on, and for the next three centuries, the island was to enjoy a period of relative calm. Palermo became the seat of the Viceroy’s government, which spent large amounts of money on modernizing the city. Palermo saw considerable changes in its layout: the city walls were amplified and reinforced, the Cassaro (the modern-day Corso Vittorio Emanuele) was extended down to the sea, the River Papireto was drained, the harbour was enlarged, and city hygiene was improved. A new thoroughfare cut its way across the city, named Via Maqueda after the viceroy on whose initiative it was created. The religious orders accumulated riches and other property, vying with each in the building of churches, convents, and oratories and commissioning renowned architects, painters, sculptors, and decorators and the best craftsmen of the day. The city was like a vast baroque building site - and the nobles, in their magnificent palaces, certainly had no desire to be outdone in this competition in opulence.

Palermo was however also decimated by periodic plagues and epidemics; and while the aristocracy and the clergy flaunted their wealth, the ordinary people lived in abject poverty. Rebellions of the entire populace - the most celebrated of which was led by Giuseppe Alessi in 1647 - were systematically put down with considerable bloodshed.

The barons enjoyed a period of great wealth and privilege, building numerous magnificent palaces and summer residences. During the reign of Ferdinand IV (1759-1825), the enlightened viceroy Caracciolo succeeded in suppressing the odious Tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition and instituted a series of thoroughgoing reforms, especially in the tax and education systems. In the meanwhile, the conflict became even more embittered between the opposed forces of the Bourbon government, in Naples, and the Sicilian nobility, which was supported by groups of intellectuals and the bourgeois classes. In the wake of the French Revolution, a constitutional reform was granted in 1812; two years later, however, the Neapolitan Court turned Sicily into a province of the kingdom under the rule of a specially appointed Lieutenant.

In the newly formed national state, Palermo began to recover after half a century of decline. A new bourgeois mercantile class ventured timidly into the world of business, the city expanded beyond the old town centre, new quarters arose, a new thoroughfare - Via Roma - was built as part of the Giarrusso town-planning scheme, and after the example of other great European capital cities two grandiose theatres were built - the Politeama and the Massimo. This was the age of the Florios, a family of farsighted entrepreneurs who developed trade, culture, and the arts: thanks to them, the first two decades of the twentieth century saw Palermo go through a period of prosperity and become, among other things, a health resort renowned throughout Europe. The architect Ernesto Basile was the prime mover of this rebirth of the city, together with other leading artists and craftsmen of the day who came to work with him, giving rise to the short-lived but glorious period of Liberty style, as this particular form of Art Nouveau is known in Italy. In 1947 Sicily was made an autonomous region, and Palermo - much damaged by the bombings of World War II - became the seat of the Regional Sicilian Government and the Parliamentary Assembly.