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Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards, Bourbons: in almost three thousand years Palermo has changed hands many times, and nearly every ruler left something you can still see in its streets. Read the eras in order, or pick the one you want from the bar above.
The oldest traces of Palermo are on Monte Pellegrino, in the Addaura caves. On the walls of one of them, discovered in 1952 and studied by the archaeologist Jole Bovio Marconi, human and animal figures were engraved between 20,000 and 14,000 years ago.
At the centre of the scene a group of figures seems to dance around two men lying on the ground: perhaps a ritual, but its meaning is still debated. It is one of the most important groups of prehistoric art in the Mediterranean. Today the caves cannot be visited because of the risk of falling rocks.
The Phoenicians founded a trading post here, probably in the 7th century BC, on a tongue of land between two rivers, the Kemonia and the Papireto, which have since disappeared beneath the city. Together with Motya and Solunto it was one of the three Phoenician cities on the island, allies of Carthage.
The name Zyz appears on its coins; one hypothesis is that it means “flower”, after the shape of the town between the two rivers. The Greeks, who ruled eastern Sicily, never conquered it, but they gave it the name it would go down in history with: Panormos, “all harbour”, for its natural, sheltered landing place.
During the First Punic War Panormos was one of Carthage's main bases. In 254 BC the Roman fleet besieged it and forced it to surrender: those who could paid a ransom, the others, about 13,000, were taken prisoner.
Carthage tried to win it back. In 250 BC the consul Lucius Caecilius Metellus defeated Hasdrubal's army beneath the walls; from 247 to 244 Hamilcar Barca camped on the height of Heirkte, which many identify with Monte Pellegrino, without success. Panormus stayed loyal to Rome and was one of the five free cities of Sicily exempt from tribute.
In imperial times it was a wealthy city, as shown by the mosaics discovered in December 1868 in Piazza Vittoria, including the Orpheus mosaic, now in the Salinas Museum.
With the crisis of the Western Roman Empire came the Germanic peoples. In 440 Genseric's Vandals, sailing from Africa, besieged Palermo, and in the following decades they raided the island's coasts again and again. Sicily then passed to Odoacer and, at the end of the century, to Theodoric's Ostrogoths.
In 535 the general Belisarius, sent by Emperor Justinian, took Palermo from the Ostrogoths. For almost three centuries the city was part of the Byzantine Empire, but the centre of power on the island was Syracuse, not Palermo.
Byzantine rule began to end in 827, when an Arab and Berber army from North Africa landed at Mazara.
After a siege of about a year, Palermo surrendered in 831. Its new rulers called it Balarm and made it the capital of Sicily in place of Syracuse. The conquest of the rest of the island took more than a century: Taormina fell in 902, and Rometta, the last Byzantine stronghold, in 965.
Balarm became one of the largest cities in the Mediterranean. The geographer Ibn Hawqal, who described it in the 10th century, counted more than three hundred mosques. New crops arrived, such as citrus fruit, along with new irrigation techniques; Christians and Jews stayed on, paying a tax.
What remains of that era is above all the names, the layout of districts such as the Kalsa, and the markets, which still resemble a souk.
In January 1072 Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger, Norman knights who had come from Calabria, entered Palermo. Roger became its count; his son Roger II was crowned in the cathedral as the first King of Sicily on Christmas Day 1130.
The Norman kingdom held Latins, Greeks and Arabs together: Muslim officials worked at court, documents were written in three languages, and the Arab geographer al-Idrisi wrote for the king his great treatise on the known world (1154). This encounter produced Arab-Norman architecture: red domes, pointed arches, Byzantine gold mosaics.
Roger II was followed by William I, known as the Bad, and William II, known as the Good, who built Monreale Cathedral.
In 1186 Constance of Hauteville, daughter of Roger II, married Henry VI of Swabia, son of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. When William II died without heirs, Henry conquered the kingdom and had himself crowned in Palermo on Christmas Day 1194. The next day, at Jesi, his son Frederick II was born.
Raised in Palermo, Frederick became emperor and made the city the heart of his court: this is where the Sicilian School of poetry was born, the first lyric poetry in the Italian vernacular. His contemporaries called him Stupor mundi, “the wonder of the world”. He led the Sixth Crusade (1228–1229) and spent his life fighting the Papacy and the city-states of northern Italy.
He died in 1250 and is buried in Palermo Cathedral, beside his parents and Roger II. In 1266 his son Manfred was defeated and killed at Benevento by Charles of Anjou.
Charles of Anjou, brother of the King of France, moved the capital to Naples and ruled Sicily with heavy taxes and French officials. Discontent exploded in Palermo on 30 March 1282, Easter Monday, outside the church of Santo Spirito: according to tradition a French soldier, Drouet, insulted a woman of Palermo and the crowd rose up at the hour of vespers.
Within a few weeks the revolt spread across the whole island. The Sicilians offered the crown to Peter III of Aragon, husband of Constance, Manfred's daughter.
Peter III landed at Trapani on 30 August 1282 and on 4 September was crowned King of Sicily in Palermo Cathedral. The War of the Vespers against the Angevins of Naples began.
When the Crown of Aragon negotiated to hand the island back, the Sicilian parliament elected as king Frederick III, brother of the King of Aragon, crowned in Palermo in 1296. The Peace of Caltabellotta of 1302 split the old kingdom in two: the island to Frederick, the mainland to the Angevins. Fighting broke out again several times, however, and the question was settled only in 1372 with the treaty signed at Avignon.
Meanwhile the great baronial families, such as the Chiaramonte, built palaces like the Steri. When Martin I died in 1409, the kingdom passed to the Crown of Aragon.
From 1412 Sicily had kings who lived in Spain and governed it through viceroys. Under Ferdinand the Catholic came the Inquisition and, in 1492, the expulsion of the Jews, who formed a large community in Palermo.
The crown then passed to the Habsburgs. Charles V entered the city in September 1535, on his way back from Tunis; Porta Nuova, built in 1583 and rebuilt after a fire in 1669, commemorates that entry. In the 16th and 17th centuries the viceroys redesigned the city: in 1600 Via Maqueda was opened, crossing the Cassaro, today Corso Vittorio Emanuele, at the Quattro Canti. Baroque churches such as San Giuseppe dei Teatini and Casa Professa were built, and the fountain of Piazza Pretoria arrived from Florence.
“One cannot imagine anything more pleasant or more enchanting than this place, nothing sweeter than its air; nothing to equal the grandeur and magnificence of its palaces, nothing more delightful than its fountains and gardens.”
The European wars of succession treated Sicily as a bargaining chip. With the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 the island went to Victor Amadeus II of Savoy, who was crowned in Palermo Cathedral. In 1720 the House of Savoy gave it up in exchange for Sardinia, and Sicily passed to Habsburg Austria until the Bourbons arrived.
Charles of Bourbon conquered the kingdom in 1734 and the following year had himself crowned King of Sicily in Palermo, though he ruled from Naples. His son Ferdinand took refuge in Palermo twice, driven out of Naples by the French: in 1798 and again from 1806 to 1815. Those decades saw the opening of the Botanical Garden in 1795 and the Palazzina Cinese, a royal residence begun in 1799.
In 1812, under British protection, Sicily obtained a constitution. In 1816 Ferdinand abolished it together with the Kingdom of Sicily and created the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, with Naples as its capital.
Palermo rose up in 1820 and again on 12 January 1848: for sixteen months the island was independent, with Ruggero Settimo at the head of the government. Ferdinand II reconquered it in 1849; because of the bombardment of Messina he was nicknamed King Bomba.
On 4 April 1860 the Gancia revolt, led by Francesco Riso, failed: thirteen prisoners were shot on 14 April. But the spark had been lit. On 11 May Garibaldi landed at Marsala with the Thousand, on the 14th at Salemi he took on the dictatorship of the island, and on 27 May he entered Palermo through Porta Termini.
In the plebiscite of October 1860 Sicily voted for annexation; in 1861 the Kingdom of Italy was born.
Discontent with the new state remained: from 16 to 22 September 1866 the city rose up for seven and a half days, which gave the revolt its name, the Sette e mezzo.
Between the 19th and 20th centuries Palermo lived its Belle Époque. Families of entrepreneurs such as the Florios, the Inghams and the Whitakers invested in shipping, Marsala wine and tuna fisheries. The city hosted the National Exhibition of 1891–1892 and in 1897 opened the Teatro Massimo, then the third-largest opera house in Europe. It was the age of Ernesto Basile's Liberty style, the Italian Art Nouveau, and some called the city Floriopoli.
“It truly has the air of a capital, of an old sovereign city, this white Palermo surrounded by orange trees.”
The Great War, the decline of the Florios and Fascism brought that season to an end. In the Second World War Palermo, with its port, was a military target: the bombing began in 1940 and became devastating in the spring of 1943, when Allied raids destroyed entire districts of the old town.
On 22 July 1943 American troops entered the city. The rubble would remain for decades.
In 1946, even before the Italian Constitution, Sicily obtained a special statute of autonomy and Palermo became the regional capital. Since 1947 the Regional Assembly has sat in the Palazzo dei Normanni, Roger II's royal palace.
In the 1950s and 1960s property speculation, with the complicity of the Mafia, wiped out Liberty villas and the citrus groves of the Conca d'Oro: the so-called Sack of Palermo. The old town, still scarred by the war, emptied out.
Between the late 1970s and the early 1990s the Mafia killed magistrates, politicians, police officers and journalists. Among the victims were the President of the Region, Piersanti Mattarella (1980), and General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa (1982).
The Maxi Trial prepared by Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino brought hundreds of defendants to court from 1986. In 1992 both were killed: at Capaci on 23 May, in Via D'Amelio on 19 July. In 1993 the Mafia also killed Father Pino Puglisi, parish priest of Brancaccio, now beatified. The city's response, with white sheets hanging from balconies and the tree outside Falcone's home in Via Notarbartolo, marked the beginning of a change.
Since the 1990s the old town has slowly come back to life: restored palaces, squares given back to pedestrians, new residents. In 2015 UNESCO added Arab-Norman Palermo and the cathedrals of Cefalù and Monreale to the World Heritage List; in 2018 Palermo was Italian Capital of Culture.
Today the city has about 630,000 inhabitants, is home to the university and the regional government, and tourism has become one of its main resources.