Palermo

Palermo is the capital of Sicily, a port city on the island's northern coast at the foot of Monte Pellegrino. The Greeks called it Panormos, all harbor, while the Phoenicians knew it as Ziz, the flower. Its Arab-Norman churches and palaces were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015.

The Phoenicians set up the town in the 8th century BC, and it stayed with Carthage until it passed to Rome in the 3rd century BC. From the 9th century it was the capital of the Emirate of Sicily, which brought mosques, irrigated gardens and the growing of lemons and oranges. The Normans took the city in the 11th century, and Roger II was crowned king of Sicily in its cathedral in 1130. His court kept Arab, Greek and Latin scholars, and the geographer al-Idrisi drew his map of the known world for him. Emperor Frederick II grew up in Palermo, and the poets of his Sicilian School wrote some of the first verse in an Italian vernacular. Spanish viceroys and later the Bourbons ruled before Sicily joined the Kingdom of Italy in the 1860s.

The port of Palermo sends ferries to Naples, Genoa and Sardinia, and cruise ships berth at its Stazione Marittima. Fincantieri builds and repairs ships at its yard on the harbor. The Conca d'Oro plain around the city has long grown lemons and the late-ripening Ciaculli mandarin, which Slow Food protects as a presidium.

The Palatine Chapel, built for Roger II, joins Byzantine gold mosaics with a painted wooden ceiling carved by Fatimid craftsmen. Ballarò market sells fish and vegetables beside stalls of panelle, chickpea fritters fried in the street. Santa Rosalia, the patron saint, is honored each July with a procession that pulls a tall wagon from the cathedral toward the sea. The Teatro Massimo, designed by Giovan Battista Filippo Basile and finished by his son Ernesto at the end of the 19th century, stages opera and ballet.