The Emblematic Province — Sicily from the Roman Empire to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies

Abstract

‘Prima omnium, id quod ornamentum imperii est, provincia est appellata (She was the first to receive the title of province, the first such jewel in our imperial crown)’.¹ With these words Cicero (106–43 BC) depicts Sicily in the Verrines, emphasising what was to be the island’s condition — naturaliter provincialis as it were — for most of its subsequent history up to the Unification of Italy (1861). This condition, implying the absence of political autonomy, has meant that starting from De rebus siculis by the Dominican Tommaso Fazello, published in Palermo in 1558,² and for at least the next two centuries, the historians hailing from the island tended to view their past as a succession of invasions, beginning with the Sicani and Sicels and proceeding with the Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, French and Spanish. No one invading power was given priority, even though the Greek period and the Norman reconquest of the island for Christendom were recognised as being particularly important.³ As a corollary to this interpretation, Fazello found it very difficult, if not impossible, to identify and define the Sicilian people. He could really do no more than speak of their collective mores, namely the customs which took root and developed under the successive invasions.⁴