What every conqueror left behind

In May 1149 a priest named Grisandus carried his mother's body across Palermo and set a slab of marble over her.

It is about the size of a laptop. Four inscriptions crowd around an inlaid cross — Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Arabic written in Hebrew letters — and each dates the same week in its own era, so one burial carries four different years. Trilingual stones survive from Norman Sicily. This is the only quadrilingual one anyone has found.

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The Arabic panel is not a translation of the others. It calls the Pope the imam of Rome, and it calls Palermo Cathedral the jāmiʿ — the Friday mosque, which the building had been until 1072. Seventy-seven years after the Christians took the city back, that is what the stonecutter wrote, and nobody stopped him.

The first Greek town in Sicily lies under lemon trees below Taormina. Chalcidians founded Naxos around 734 BC on a low lava headland; Syracuse followed the next year. Dionysius I took Naxos by treachery in 403 BC, sold everyone in it, and pulled the walls down. The black polygonal blocks are still there, and the street grid runs on under the citrus.

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Segesta's temple was never finished. Thirty-six columns, no room inside, and the bosses the masons used to lever the blocks into place still sitting on the steps where they should have been chiselled away. Either the money stopped when the wars reached western Sicily, or nobody ever intended a room — a Greek shell built round an Elymian rite. The stones do not settle it.

Eleven kilometres from Selinunte, at the Cave di Cusa, column drums lie exactly where the quarrymen left them in 409 BC. One is still joined to the bedrock by a collar of stone, the cut ring around it half finished.

The theatre at Syracuse was not built but subtracted: sixty-seven rows quarried down into a hillside, with the names of Hieron's family cut into the rock above the walkway. The Spanish carted the stage away under Charles V to fortify Ortygia. Greek drama has been staged there since 1914 — every other year for most of that time, stopped by both wars, and annually only since 2001.

An unfinished Doric temple standing alone on a grassy spur, seen from above and to one side. The full colonnade carries an unbroken entablature and both pediments, and daylight shows straight through the building because there is no room inside it, only grass on the platform. A ridge and a cultivated valley run out behind under a blue sky. Open full screenTwo massive cylindrical column drums cut from pale limestone bedrock in a shallow quarry hollow. The nearer one stands about two metres across, its flank scored with bedding lines and blotched with lichen, and a narrow hand-cut channel runs right around it, separating it from the rock wall behind. Quarry rubble lies in the grass, and a single small figure at the right gives the scale. Open full screenA Greek theatre seen from the rim above: rows of seats cut down into a pale limestone slope in a wide semicircle, the flat orchestra and a low ruined stage building at the centre, cypresses and umbrella pines immediately beyond, and the modern city and its bay on the horizon. Open full screen

Sicily is where Rome first governed a place instead of swallowing it. That began in 241 BC, and Rome did not trouble to write a new tax law — it took over the Syracusan one and skimmed a tenth of every harvest for two and a half centuries, until Augustus swapped the tithe for a flat tax.

Cato called the island the storehouse of the republic and the nurse at whose breast the Roman people is fed. Cicero quotes him in 70 BC while prosecuting the governor who had emptied it: the longest speech he ever wrote, and mostly an argument about wheat measures.

Two things outlasted the grain. Near Piazza Armerina, three and a half thousand square metres of mosaic floor survive because a hillside came down over the villa in the twelfth century and nobody walked on it for eight hundred years — including a corridor that reads as a shipping manifest in stone, with elephants going up a gangplank into a hold. And in 75 BC Cicero went looking for Archimedes' grave. The Syracusans assured him there was no such thing. He found it in a thicket of brambles by looking for a stone sphere set on a cylinder.

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In 662 Constans II left Constantinople, where he was thoroughly hated, and by the next year was governing the Roman empire from Syracuse — the only emperor after the fall of the west to rule from Italian ground. He broke the journey with twelve days in Rome and stripped the bronze from its buildings, the Pantheon included, to be shipped after him.

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Five years later his own chamberlain killed him in the bath, by most accounts with a bucket.

They sailed from Sousse on 14 June 827 and were ashore at Mazara three days later, let in by a Byzantine officer in revolt, under a commander who was a jurist rather than a soldier. Palermo fell in 831, Syracuse in 878, Taormina in 902. The last strongholds held until 965 — a hundred and thirty-eight years, longer than the Norman kingdom that replaced it.

That lopsidedness is still on the map. The Arabs split the island into three — Val Demone in the north-east, Val di Noto in the south-east, Val di Mazara in the west — the Normans kept the division, and it survived until 1812. The west had been Arab for well over a century while the north-east was still Greek and Christian, which is why the west carries Arabic place names, the north-east Greek ones, and why the bread and the church fronts change where they do. Mazara del Vallo still keeps its vallo. Militello was Militello in Val di Noto until 1862, when a reshuffle renamed it in Val di Catania — and UNESCO listed it under the Val di Noto anyway. The boundaries themselves are rivers, not lines on a map someone drew freehand: the Salso runs south down the middle of the island to the sea at Licata, the Simeto closes off the north-east, and the three valli meet near Enna — about as close to a middle as the island has.

Ibn Hawqal saw Palermo in 972 and counted more than three hundred mosques. He also disliked the city, blaming the residents' habit of eating raw onions, which he was confident had damaged their minds, and complaining about the number of schoolteachers. The one eyewitness account of Arab Palermo is a list of grievances, which makes it a thoroughly Sicilian document.

The rest is underground and in the mouth. Hand-dug qanāt still thread the limestone under Palermo, moving water by gravity with no pump. The oldest is Islamic; the Spanish dug most of the rest. Three can be walked. Around three hundred Arabic words survive in Sicilian, nearly all agricultural — the gebbia that holds irrigation water, the saja that fills it, zàgara for orange blossom. Farmers use them without knowing whose words they are. Maltese is what the same dialect became somewhere nobody Latinised it away.

The Alcantara is al-qanṭara, the bridge — the river takes its name from a Roman span the Arabs found near its mouth. Etna's local name, Mongibello, is monte and jabal stacked together: mountain, then mountain again.

Inside a hand-cut water tunnel: a chamber worked into pale soft limestone, the walls left vertical and chisel-marked, a darker damp band running low along them, a narrow passage continuing into shadow at the centre, bright green maidenhair fern along the wet floor and dried roots hanging in from the rock above. Open full screenA narrow paved lane between close ochre-rendered houses with blue-painted iron window grilles and blue shuttered doors. A low stone buttressing arch springs from the left wall and lands on the right one at first-floor height, spanning the lane; beyond it the alley runs on into a shadowed passage. Open full screen

Messina fell to the Normans in 1061, Palermo in January 1072, and the conquest closed in 1091. Roger II was crowned in Palermo on Christmas Day 1130 and kept the previous staff.

The Cappella Palatina is the whole argument in one room. Consecrated in 1140, its nave carries a wooden muqarnas ceiling — the only one of its kind left standing from the medieval Islamic world — built by Muslim craftsmen trained in Fatimid Cairo from pieces a centimetre across. Painted up there, above a Christian altar, are hunters, dancers, drinkers and gazelles, with some seventy-five Arabic inscriptions wishing health and power on a Latin king. The mosaics change language partway: Greek lettering in the older work, Latin in what came later.

Roger's coronation mantle has a gold Kufic border dating it to the year 528 of the Hijra. It went on to dress Holy Roman Emperors for six hundred years, hijri date and all, and it is in Vienna now.

The sanctuary of a small chapel seen from the nave: three gold-ground mosaic apses under pointed arches, Christ Pantocrator at the centre with his right hand raised and an open book in his left, the Virgin enthroned beneath him between two attendants, and Saint Peter and Saint Paul either side. Spiral-inlaid columns and a tall wrought-iron candle-stand stand at the left edge. Open full screenA semicircular ceremonial mantle displayed flat against black: deep crimson silk, a mirrored pair of gold lions bringing down camels either side of a stylised palm tree at the centre, all outlined in pearl and silver thread, a jewelled band across the straight top edge, and a line of gold Kufic script running the length of the curved hem. Open full screen

An earthquake destroyed the south-east of the island and killed tens of thousands. What came after is why the Val di Noto looks the way it does: dozens of towns rebuilt at speed, inside a single architectural moment, by people handed the rare and terrible licence to start again.

Noto was abandoned where it stood and built again from nothing on a new site, to a plan, in honey-coloured stone. Ragusa could not agree — half went back to the old rock, half built afresh on the ridge above — and it is still visibly two towns. UNESCO lists eight of them together.

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A stone archway in pale gold limestone, floodlit against a deep blue evening sky, with fluted Corinthian pilasters either side. Three sculptures stand on the parapet above: a crenellated tower, a bird and a hound. Through the arch a paved pedestrian street recedes between tall buildings under multi-coloured arches of festival lights, with about a dozen people walking under them. Open full screenA woman in a straw hat stands with her back to the camera at the low circular rim of a stone fountain, looking at the carved figure of a boy seated on a rocky mass at its far side. Behind and above, pale limestone fronts, a terrace with an iron railing, and a weathered bell tower of four shrinking stages against a deep blue sky. Open full screenA honey-coloured Baroque church front photographed from below at night. Its centre curves outwards, carrying free-standing columns, a balustraded balcony and an arched window under a broken curved pediment. Palm fronds fill the foreground and a tall structure of blue and gold festival bulbs stands to the right. Open full screenA lower town packed onto a limestone spur in ochre and grey stone, seen from the higher town across a valley: roofs stepping down the slope, a domed church and a bell tower at the lower left, a long low convent block on the crest with trees behind it, and a road curving up the right-hand slope under a pale hazy sky. Open full screen

Cosa nostra grew in the nineteenth century out of the citrus groves, the sulphur mines and the absentee estates of the interior: protection sold, in the literal sense, wherever the state did not reach.

In 1992 it killed Giovanni Falcone with four hundred kilos of explosive packed into a drain under the motorway at Capaci on 23 May, and Paolo Borsellino with a car bomb in via d'Amelio on 19 July. What followed matters more. Palermo put their faces on its walls, and businesses began, slowly and at real risk, to refuse to pay.

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It is not over, and a Sicilian will tell you so before you can ask.

Between 1880 and the 1920s well over a million Sicilians left, most of them for the Americas, most from the interior and the poor south coast.

The paperwork stayed. Every comune keeps its own registers, and an atto di nascita from 1890 is usually still on the shelf, in a bound volume, in the town the family walked out of.