Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea and one of the 20 regions of Italy. The Strait of Messina divides it from the region of Calabria in Southern Italy. It is one of the five Italian autonomous regions and is officially referred to as Regione Siciliana. The region has 5 million inhabitants. Its capital city is Palermo.
Palermo is a city in southern Italy, the capital of both the autonomous region of Sicily and the Metropolitan City of Palermo, the city's surrounding metropolitan province. The city is noted for its history, culture, architecture and gastronomy, playing an important role throughout much of its existence; it is over 2,700 years old. Palermo is in the northwest of the island of Sicily, by the Gulf of Palermo in the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Sicilian cuisine is the style of cooking on the island of Sicily. It shows traces of all cultures that have existed on the island of Sicily over the last two millennia. Although its cuisine has much in common with Italian cuisine, Sicilian food also has Greek, Spanish, French and Arab influences.
The Sicilian Vespers was a successful rebellion on the island of Sicily that broke out at Easter 1282 against the rule of the French-born king Charles I, who had ruled the Kingdom of Sicily since 1266. Within six weeks, approximately 13,000 French men and women were slain by the rebels, and the government of Charles lost control of the island. This began the War of the Sicilian Vespers.
Sicilian is a Romance language that is spoken on the island of Sicily and its satellite islands. A variant, Calabro-Sicilian, is spoken in southern Calabria, where it is called Southern Calabro notably in the Metropolitan City of Reggio Calabria. Dialects of central and southern Calabria, the southern parts of Apulia and southern Salerno in Campania, on the Italian peninsula, are viewed by some linguists as forming with Sicilian dialects a broader Extreme Southern Italian language group.
"Mafia" is an informal term that is used to describe criminal organizations that bear a strong similarity to the Italian Mafia. The central activity of such an organization would be the arbitration of disputes between criminals as well as the organization and enforcement of illicit agreements between criminals through the use of or threat of violence. Mafias often engage in secondary activities such as gambling, loan sharking, drug-trafficking, prostitution, and fraud.
The Sicilian Mafia, also simply known as the Mafia and frequently referred to as Cosa nostra by its members, is an Italian Mafia-terrorist-type organized crime syndicate and criminal society originating in the region of Sicily and dating to at least the 19th century. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organisational structure and code of conduct and honor and present themselves to the public under a common brand. The basic group is known as a "family", "clan", or cosca. Each family claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town or village or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city, in which it operates its rackets. Its members call themselves "men of honour", although the public often refers to them as mafiosi. By the 20th century, following wide-scale emigration from Sicily, mafiosi established gangs in North and South America which replicate the traditions and methods of their Sicilian ancestors. The Mafia's core activities are protection racketeering, the arbitration of disputes between criminals, and the organizing and oversight of illegal agreements and transactions.
Sicilians or the Sicilian people are a Romance speaking people who are indigenous to the island of Sicily, the largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the largest and most populous of the autonomous regions of Italy.
The Province of Palermo was a province in the autonomous region of Sicily, a major island in Southern Italy. Its capital was the city of Palermo. On 4 August 2015, it was replaced by the Metropolitan City of Palermo.
The Music of Sicily refers to music created by peoples from the isle of Sicily. It was shaped by the island's history, from the island's great presence as part of Magna Grecia 2,500 years ago, through various historical incarnations as a part of the Roman Empire, then as an independent state as the Emirate of Sicily then as an integral part of the Kingdom of Sicily and later the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and, finally, as an autonomous region of the modern nation state of Italy.
Sebastiano "Nello" Musumeci is a right-wing Italian politician. Musumeci is serving as Minister for Sea Policies and the South since 22 October 2022 in the government of Giorgia Meloni.
The Palazzo dei Normanni is also called Royal Palace of Palermo. It was the seat of the Kings of Sicily with the Hauteville dynasty and served afterwards as the main seat of power for the subsequent rulers of Sicily. Since 1946 it has been the seat of the Sicilian Regional Assembly. The building is the oldest royal residence in Europe; and was the private residence of the rulers of the Kingdom of Sicily and the imperial seat of Frederick II and Conrad IV.
The Kore University of Enna, in Italian Università Kore di Enna, is a university founded in 2004 in Enna, the capital city of the Province of Enna, in the center of Sicily and has been visited by two Italian Presidents. The university has very modern facilities; it also has a strong relationships with governments and universities of the Mediterranean Sea countries and with some of European and U.S. areas.
The history of Sicily has been influenced by numerous ethnic groups. It has seen Sicily controlled by external powers – Phoenician and Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Vandal and Ostrogoth, Byzantine Greek, Aghlabid, Fatimid, Kalbid, Norman, Aragonese and Spanish – but also experiencing important periods of independence, as under the indigenous Sicanians, Elymians and Sicels, and later as the Emirate of Sicily, County of Sicily, and Kingdom of Sicily. The Kingdom was founded in 1130 by Roger II, belonging to the Siculo-Norman family of Hauteville. During this period, Sicily was prosperous and politically powerful, becoming one of the wealthiest states in all of Europe. As a result of the dynastic succession, then, the Kingdom passed into the hands of the Hohenstaufen. At the end of the 13th century, with the War of the Sicilian Vespers between the crowns of Anjou and Aragon, the island passed to the latter. In the following centuries the Kingdom entered into the personal union with the Spaniard and Bourbon crowns, while preserving effective independence until 1816. Sicily was merged with the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. Although today an Autonomous Region, with special statute, of the Republic of Italy, it has its own distinct culture.
Belmonte Mezzagno is a comune (municipality) in the Metropolitan City of Palermo in the Italian region Sicily, located about 15 kilometres (9 mi) south of Palermo.
The Sicilian Regional Assembly is the legislative body of Sicily. While it has a long history as an autonomous entity, the modern Region of Sicily was established by Royal Decree on 15 May 1946, before the Italian Republic. The Regional Assembly has the widest legislative power in Italy and is the only regional assembly to have the title of "parliament" whose members are called "deputies" as are those in Rome. Seventy deputies are elected every five years in the nine provinces.
Sicilian nationalism, or Sicilianism, is a movement in the autonomous Italian region of Sicily, as well as the Sicilian diaspora, which seeks greater autonomy or outright independence from Italy, and/or promotes further inclusion of the Sicilian identity, culture, history, and linguistic variety.
Mario Fasino was an Italian politician, journalist, and one of the co-founders of Christian Democratic Party (DC) in Sicily. He served as the President of the region of Sicily from 20 September 1969 until 22 December 1972. Fasino was elected President of the Sicilian Regional Assembly from 1974 to 1976. In addition to his political career, Fasino, a journalist, was the director of "Voce cattolica", the official publication of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Palermo.
Sicilian orthography uses a variant of the Latin alphabet consisting of 23 or more letters to write the Sicilian language.
Free Sicilians is a Sicilian nationalist and pro-independence political party in Sicily, Italy. The party was founded in 2016 in order to revive the island's right to self-government.
