PALERMO, ARCHDIOCESE OF. - City and archdiocese on the island of Sicily. It has an area of approximately 1,416 sq km, with a population of 707,093 inhabitants, of whom 705,000 are Catholics, distributed among 98 parishes, served by 303 diocesan priests and 370 regulars; it has a major and a minor seminary, 49 male religious communities and 124 female ones (Ann. Pont., 1952, p. 308).
The boundaries of the diocese in the most ancient times are unknown; the present ones repeat the arrangement of the Norman age in connection with the territories of the neighboring dioceses of Monreale, Cefalù, Mazara and Agrigento. The small territory of the diocese of Palermo is explained by the particular position of the city in the division of the island between Robert and Roger.
I. ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF THE CITY IN ANCIENT TIMES
The hills surrounding P., ancient Panormus, and the plain itself, in caves and open-air sites, preserve evidence of the most ancient humanity in Sicily, belonging to the Upper Paleolithic. Other remains of a more recent civilization, of sub-Neolithic type, must be attributed to the Sicani of the ancient historiographical tradition, of Mediterranean stock and language, and attest to their presence in the villages and in the present site of P., especially on the slopes of Mt. Pellegrino (Valdesi district). In the territory, toward the end of the 8th century B.C., the Phoenician-Carthaginian colony of Panormus settled; it occupied the height of Piazza Vittoria, near a deep harbor inlet, which gradual silting has reduced to the present "Cala." The Phoenician necropolis with hypogea existing along the Corso Calatafimi attests to the life of the city, which flourished rapidly through maritime trade and the development of the agricultural economy in the surrounding area, already described in the 4th century B.C. as the "garden" (of Sicily) by Polybius, celebrated by many writers, from Ugo Falcando (12th century) onward, and from the 16th century to the present called the "Conca d'oro." From the original hill, P. gained space toward the sea, adding to the old quarter (Paleapoli) the new one (Neapoli) along the small rivers Papireto and Maltempo; the complex of the two quarters was enclosed by a mighty wall, whose remains are of various techniques and ages.
The historical notices about Panormus concern the function of its port as a Carthaginian base during the struggle between Carthage and the Greek cities of Sicily. And with the port are connected the events that followed when Rome took over, after a hard siege in 258-57 B.C. by the consul A. Atilius Calatinus. An attempt at reconquest, in 250 B.C. by Hasdrubal, was repelled by Caecilius Metellus, with a hard battle near the walls; nor did Hamilcar Barca succeed in it, who from Mt. Pellegrino, for four years, put the Roman garrison of Panormus to a hard test, without breaking its resistance. During the Roman period Panormus, a "free and immune" city, continued its maritime activity, as the symbols of its coinage and the existence of a "curator portensis kalendarii," a magistrate in charge of credit for seafaring people, demonstrate. Remains of well-decorated buildings attest to an urban renewal in the early days of the Empire; but it is uncertain whether this coincides with the deduction of a colony, attributed to Vespasian in a document of doubtful value. Certainly Panormus gradually assumed a prevailing importance among the cities of western Sicily. Genseric, having landed in 410 at Lilybaeum, occupied P. after a long resistance and sacked it. In 491 Theodoric fortified it, but Belisarius in 535, after a long siege, then overcame the strength of the fortifications and succeeded in occupying it. Tradition points to the now-destroyed church of S. Maria della Pinta - an original basilica with an external portico - as the votive monument erected by the Byzantine victor. The necropolis of Roman Panormus was around the present Via Bosco, to the east of the walls; on the other side, in Via Cavour, are instead the tombs of the Byzantine period, one of which bears an episode of a cloth merchant from Alexandria in Egypt. The last period of Byzantine Sicily concludes in the 9th century with the Arab landing in Sicily. Ziyadat Allah in 850 laid siege to P. The city resisted for a year and was taken through famine and pestilence; Arab sources assert, exaggerating, that of 70,000 inhabitants only 3,000 were saved.
II. INTRODUCTION OF CHRISTIANITY AND EARLY HISTORY OF THE PALERMITAN CHURCH
Open to trade toward Carthaginian Africa, a region of ancient Christianity, it is likely that P. received the seeds of the new faith quite early. But the notices concerning the hierarchy are relatively late: the tradition of a Theodore, bishop of P. at the very beginning of the 2nd century, does not rest on critical foundations; nor does the mention of P. in the Passio s. Agathae, a pious writing no earlier than the 5th century, have chronological value. A letter of Pope Leo the Great mentioning a bishop of P. is likewise apocryphal. The first certain bishop would be St. Mamilian, deported by the Vandals (439), together with some of his clergy, to the island of Giglio. However, at P. a Christian community is presupposed in the 4th century, a series of hypogea near the little valley of Maltempo - where the sepulchral church of St. Michael is noteworthy - and at the Papireto, where the catacomb of Porta d'Ossuna is. As for the rest of Sicily, so too for P. the notices concerning Christian life increase under St. Gregory the Great. From the epistolary it is gathered that at least one of the six monasteries founded on the island by the Pontiff, with its own property, that of St. Hermes, was at P., on the site later occupied by the cenobium of St. John of the Hermits; that an Isidore was leaving his possessions for the founding of a xenodochium of the city, and that there existed there the monasteries of St. Theodore, of Sts. Maximus and Agatha, of St. Adrian, one called the Pretorian, and one of women called that of St. Martin. St. Gregory made P. the seat of the administration of the property of the Church in western Sicily, when he deemed it right to replace the single rector, with seat at Syracuse, of earlier times with two rectors. Noteworthy are the provisions issued so that no wrong should be done to the Jews, from which must be inferred the existence of a Jewish nucleus of some importance and of a popular antisemitic current. Around 672 was born at P., where his father, a native of Syria, had settled, St. Sergius, one of the five pontiffs that Sicily gave in that century to the universal Church. At the time of the Muslim conquest, the bishop was a Luke, who managed to escape the massacre.
III. PALERMO FROM THE ARABS TO THE ARAGONESE
In 833 Zijâdat Allâh sent to P. as his lieutenant the prince of the blood Abû Fihr with the title of yâhib, in which the autonomy of Sicily is already outlined, with an almost nominal dependence on the caliphate of Qajrawân. There gradually arose a whole system of judicial, political and administrative magistracies, which was to leave lasting traces in P. The history of P. in the Arab period reflects the fundamental motif of the Sicilian events of that time: a conflict between the authority of the prince — first of the Aghlabid house, then of the Kalbid one — and the Muslim nobility, against which the weight of the Sicilian people was set. Among such conflicts, notable is that of 899-94 against the ties with Africa, which led to an agreement with the Christians of Val Demone. The struggle against the sons of the emir Jûsuf (d. 998) provoked a certain Byzantine recovery, with some success in the time of George Maniakes (1038), which was to sow the seed of the disappearance of Arab rule, and for the moment shattered the unity of the emirate, which was replaced, in several places, by independent domains and communities; P., driving out the emir Samşân ad-Dawlah, governed itself as a republic, under the authority of the gamâ'ah, a council of heads of families, of representatives of the religious corporations and of individuals of particular wealth and learning, which had already had local administrative functions. The economic development of P. increased in commercial relations with Africa and in agricultural innovations, with the development of gardens and the introduction of citrus fruits, the great gift that, together with the carob tree, the Arabs made to the West, and which flourished in the Conca d'Oro. Nor are there lacking documents of a flourishing of Muslim letters. The Sicilian Abû 'Abdallâh translated Dioscorides into Arabic; a famous teacher of law in P. was Abû Sa'îd Luq-mân; the names of several Sicilian authors of biographical accounts are preserved. A splendid flowering is found in the 11th-12th centuries in the sciences and philosophy, in law, in philology, as well as in poetry and music. Fifty years after the conquest, the monk Theodosius, led as a prisoner to P. with his bishop after the fall of Syracuse, speaks of P. as a famous and populous city, surrounded by suburbs that seemed themselves to be proud cities. More vivid are the praises of a merchant of Baghdad, Ibn Hawqal, who visits P. at the end of the 10th century; he describes it as divided into five quarters, all differently populated and seats of various activities. According to the calculations of M. Amari, from some element of this description P. would then have had 350,000 inhabitants. If the principal mosque was the ancient Byzantine Cathedral, Ibn Hawqal points out as many as 300 others in the city and 200 in the suburbs, among public, corporate and private ones. But of so many Arab monuments, only a few remains of foundations are left in P., and a rectangular hall near S. Giovanni degli Eremiti; but this is a condition, strange as it may seem, common to all Sicily. If the original buildings are lacking, the influence of Arab art
(phot. Enit)
PALERMO, ARCHDIOCESE of. - Bell tower of the Martorana (12th century). Palermo.
through the work of Muslim craftsmen nevertheless constitutes one of the fundamental elements of art in the subsequent Norman age. Among the troops of the strategos Maniakes, in the extreme Byzantine attempt to reconquer Sicily, was a contingent of Normans, already then settled in lower Italy; a few years later these returned to the Island to take possession of it on their own account. Four years after their landing, their leaders Roger and Robert Guiscard were pressing at the gates of P. The city was emerging from a raid by the Pisans who, having forced the port, captured some ships, ravaged the surroundings, carried off treasures with which they began the construction of their Cathedral (v. PISA). The Norman siege concluded in 1061. P. with all western Sicily was held by Robert Guiscard; to Roger was assigned the rest of the Island, not yet entirely conquered. But setting out for southern Italy, Robert first left in P. a governor of his own, then ceded other territories to his brother; and shortly afterwards, the latter's son and successor Roger ceded to his uncle half the capital. When the latter died, the widow Adelasia, regent for her son, also named Roger, placed her residence in P. Aid furnished to his cousin William, the new duke of Apulia, obtained the other half of P. for the young count Roger, who very soon united the domains on both sides of the Strait and took the crown of king in P. at Christmas of 1130.
The Sicilian spirit immediately creates works of art and cultural initiatives of universal value. The church of the Martorana, already completed in 1143 by the admiral George of Antioch, inspired in its central plan and mosaic decoration by the courtly taste of Constantinople, welcomes Muslim elements in its expanded pointed arches and in its decoration; in the Palatine Chapel, already partly decorated at the time of its consecration (1140), some mosaics show the intervention on Byzantine taste of local craftsmen, while the ceiling is a monument of pure Oriental art. Structures and friezes of Muslim type prevail in the church of S. Giovanni degli Eremiti, in the original buildings of the Norman Royal Palace (here the use of brick suggests the white and red appearance of P., noted by the traveler al-Muqaddasi), and in the suburban villas of Maredole and Baida, of the Zisa and the Cuba; while there intervenes, especially in sculpture, the direct experience of the marble-workers of southern Italy, to whom the porphyry sarcophagi of the cathedral of P. (formerly at Cefalù), the candelabrum of the Palatina, and the first expressions of the cloister of Monreale are due, interweaving with elements suggested by the Norman ruling class, which assert themselves in the Cathedral (1184), but are already glimpsed in the Magione (1161) and at S. Spirito (1173). Some influence is also exercised by those Lombard masters who move to Sicily. Robert Guiscard had scarcely entered P. when the bishop Nicodemus, who, like his predecessors throughout the Islamic period, exercised his ministry from the small suburban church of S. Ciriaca — on the site, it seems, where later the cathedral of Monreale (v.) was to rise — returning to the city took possession again of the ancient Cathedral, reconsecrated.
The influence of the Arab element in Sicily is a pure commonplace of half-culture, which mistakes Mediterranean characteristics for ethnic and customary Arab relics. Having lived side by side, in some places fifty, in others two hundred years — nowhere more than three centuries — Sicilians and Arabs did not merge or mingle, nor did they overstep the religious barrier. The Arab element, after a gradual thinning in the period that might be called that of "captivity," during which it had not ceased to create some political trouble, is opposed during the reign of William II, induced to leave Sicily, and is radically eliminated in 1223, when Frederick orders its deportation to Lucera, and in the following years it is removed from the last seats in a definitive manner. Even within the framework of a policy of collaboration, the Normans presented themselves in Sicily as restorers of Christianity. Count Roger in one of his diplomas claims "in conquista Siciliae episcopales ecclesias ordinavi"; among these in the first place that of Palermo, to which he assigned conspicuous possessions with various diplomas beginning in 1086, and which in 1134 was recognized as metropolitan of Sicily by the pontiff Adrian IV, who proposed for it the bishop Hugh.
A tradition attributes to this period the virgin St. Rosalia, of illustrious lineage, who abandoned the court to live as an anchorite in caves of the Quisquina and of M. Pellegrino; her cult flourished anew after the discovery of her relics in 1624 when, during a pestilence, she was proclaimed patroness of P. (R. Pirro [v. bibl.], II, p. 226).
These grants and the initiative of the sovereigns in the religious revival, especially with regard to the palatine churches, which arose in all the Norman castles and residences, represented the first step toward that religious policy which was to be completed in that institution later called the "Sicilian monarchy" (v.). The son and successor (1134) of King Roger, William I, faced the combined hostilities of the Pope, the Emperor of Byzantium and the German Emperor; but above all the growing disintegration of internal forces, which was presided over by his minister Maio of Bari. The splendor of the Kingdom and of P. did not diminish, according to the contemporary description of Hugh Falcandus. A better reputation than William I, who nonetheless bore the nickname "the Bad," was enjoyed by his son William II. At his death (1189) the parliament elected as king Tancred, count of Lecce, belonging to another branch of the house of Guiscard, whereas William had designated as his successor his aunt Constance, daughter of Roger II and wife of Henry VI. Bitter struggles between the followers of the two parties, marred by excesses of the German sovereign until the arrival in P. of Queen Constance, as regent of her son Frederick II, and the latter, as a child, was crowned king in the Cathedral (1198); Constance placed the Kingdom under the protection of the Church, enfeoffing it to the Holy See with an annual tribute of 1000 gold pieces, and in her will she appointed as tutor of her son Pope Innocent III, assisted by a regency council composed of the archbishops of P., Monreale and Capua. The image of P. at that time is found in a miniature of the Bern codex of the poem of Peter of Eboli, which reproduces groups of inhabitants arranged in their respective quarters. During this regency the Muslims left P., gathering in the mountains of Val di Mazara. The German counts took advantage of this, sending to Sicily Marcovaldo, who sacked the Conca d'Oro, came to battle with the national militias, with the help of Muslims, and laid siege to P.
A new age began when Frederick II (v.), at the age of fourteen, assumed the direction of affairs. At his death (1250), Manfred succeeded him, usurping the throne from his nephew Conradin. The events that brought Sicily and Naples under Charles of Anjou welded southern Italy into a new form of unity (1266-82), broken by the Palermitan uprising of Vespers. Contemporaries and posterity saw in the Vespers one of the most generous examples of a people overcoming foreign oppression. If the war led to the summoning of the Aragonese dynasty, itself foreign, it nonetheless gave rise to institutions capable of responding, in the spirit of the times, to the particular needs of the times. Diplomatic and military attempts at Angevin reconquest served only to impoverish Sicily and to provide an opening for the rule of certain barons. One of these, Giovanni Chiaramonte, an almost autonomous lord of large feudal "States," was the soul of the defense of P. in the siege of the time of Robert of Anjou, in 1325. In the struggle between the barons of the Catalan party and those of the Latin party, the Chiaramonte led the latter; in P. they possessed a palace as sumptuous as a royal residence. When the marriage of Queen Maria, daughter and heir of King Frederick III, to the young Martin of Montblanc, raised fears that Sicily was about to become a fief of the kingdom of Aragon, Andrea Chiaramonte led the personal defense, resisting the Aragonese army at P.; for violation of the agreed pacts, he was executed in front of his palace.
IV. THE SPANISH ERA
In keeping with the new political condition of 1409, P., the administrative center of the Island, with a population estimated at 65,000 inhabitants in 1492, sees in that century a certain revival, thanks to a flourishing of internal and external commerce, in the service of which the pier known as Punta della Garita was built (1445). It begins to adorn itself with a series of new buildings, churches, monasteries, palaces; it sees notable men of culture and artists flourish. Pietro Ranzano, born toward the end of the previous century, is the city's first historiographer; Antonio Beccadelli, known as il Panormita, is legate in Germany; Salvo Cassetta, mathematician; Leonardo di Bartolomeo, jurist; the blessed Pietro Geremia takes part in the Council of Florence. The painters Antonio Crescenzo and Tommaso de Vigilia inaugurated the renewal of art. In 1476 the commune summoned Andrea di Worms to open the first printing press, from which, two years later, the first book issued, the Consuetudini of P. The discontent with the Spanish regime is the fundamental motive of the history of Sicily and of P. in particular over many decades, and it erupts repeatedly. The municipal magistrate of P. protests fiercely against the expulsion of the Jews, ordered by Ferdinand the Catholic; the inquisitor is driven out by a popular uprising in 1516; the following year an insurrection breaks out led by Gianluca Squarcialupi; a few years later the conspiracy of the Imperatori brothers is organized. The coming of Charles V to P., after the Tunis expedition, his oath of fidelity to the Constitutions of the Kingdom (1535), the opening of Parliament, mark a certain truce. Special ordinances mitigate the discomfort of belonging to a distant State, through the viceroy, to whom were generally appointed personalities not lacking in merit, while during a vacancy the archbishop of P. was lieutenant by right. The magistracy of P. watched over the observance of prerogatives; when the viceroy Vigliena took initiatives contrary to the Constitution, the uprising (1609) of the praetor of P., the count of Comiso, and of the vicar of Monreale, in the name of the Church, led him to request his recall. His successor, the duke of Ossuna, acted in the economic and moral sphere and promoted that enterprise against the Turks, entrusted to don Ottavio d'Aragona, who, with the victory of Chios, stirred the national sentiment of the Sicilians. The popular revolt of 1647, in some connection with the Neapolitan one of Masaniello, claimed, through its ephemeral capitán general Giuseppe d'Alesi, political guarantees and urged the need for higher studies; it opens a series of riots throughout the rest of the century.
Toward the end of the 16th century, despite the grave plague of 1575, faced by the protomedico Filippo Ingrassia, P. counts 19,286 inhabitants (the first figure in some way calculable gives, in 1501, 106,000 inhabitants). Sumptuous buildings had come to increase the city's luster. The inertia of the Swabian period dragged on through almost the whole of the 14th century; from this age remain the Chiaramonte Palaces (in which survives the first document of the new popular Sicilian painting), and the Sclafani, and the churches of S. Agostino and S. Francesco still echoing with Romanesque survivals. The 15th century sees the epigones of medieval architecture flourish in P., nourished by the new currents of Catalan construction, in the lateral portico of the Cathedral (1426), in the church of the Gancia, in the works of Matteo Carnalivari, such as the Abbatellis and Aiutamicristo Palaces, and the church of the Catena; while painting and sculpture more effectively perceive the seeds of rebirth. In the 16th century, while painting mainly alters Sienese and Catalan tendencies and welcomes Flemish influences, and sculpture flourishes under the stimulus of Lombard artists, architecture approaches the taste of the Renaissance, with the Porta Nuova (1535), the arcades of the Royal Palace, the Palazzo Costantino, the remodeling of the Palazzo Pretorio, the Loggia dei Genovesi at the Garraffello. A center of attraction for the major centers of the Island, P. boasts throughout this period a good number of eminent personalities; among the greatest may be remembered Pietro Gavina, Elisabetta Aiutamicristo, Iano Vitali, dear to Leo X, who cultivated poetry around the hearth of the Accademia degli Accesi, instituted in 1568; Giovanni Matteo Gioberti, papal datary then bishop of Verona, the historiographer Mariano Valguarnera, the sculptor Antonello Gagini, the painter Pietro Ruzzolone. During the following century the population of P. grew slowly until it reached 160,346 inhabitants in 1714, and the city was enriched with other monuments of Spanish Baroque taste, palaces, monasteries and churches, among them S. Giuseppe dei Teatini (1621), Casa Professa (1636), and the sumptuous urban arrangement of the Quattro Canti (1609-20) due to the Roman architect Giulio Lasso. Among the most notable minds of this period must be remembered
Paolo Silvio Bocconi, a botanist of European fame, the naturalist Carlo Ventimilia, the archaeologist Filippo Paruta; more than any other the poet Antonio Veneziano, who opened the paths of art to Sicilian dialect poetry. The end of the War of the Spanish Succession began better times for P. and Sicily. Assigned first to Victor Amadeus of Savoy, crowned king at P. (1713), the Island recovered its independence. The troubles that followed in resonance with European events brought war to the gates of P., where militias of Philip V and of Charles VI came to fight. The praetor count of S. Martino, having called the people to defense, opposed both the one and the other. With the agreement that gave the Island to the Austrians, the count of Mercy came to P. in 1719 to take possession in the name of Charles V of Austria, III as king of Sicily; but for a very brief time. He was succeeded, in connection with the War of the Polish Succession, by the son of Philip V, Charles III of Bourbon. With him, though he was also sovereign of Naples, the full autonomy of Sicily was assured; he was crowned at P. in 1735; with him Sicily enters the phase of its full renaissance.
Historical studies boast the canon Antonio Mongitore, investigator of every aspect of Sicilian erudition, the canon Domenico Schiavio, Giovanni Amato, the Cassinese brothers Salvatore and Evangelista Di Blasi, the archaeologist G. L. Castelli di Torremuzza, the diarist marquis of Villabianca; above all culminates the jurist canon Rosario Gregorio. Also worthy of memory is the archbishop G. Gasch, of the Minims, called for his charity another Thomas of Villanova. The creation of the civic Library is promoted, as is that of the Filippini at the Olivella; that of the Jesuits is increased; the present Academy of Sciences and Letters is instituted (1718) under the name Accademia del Buon Gusto. The stuccoes, admirable for their composed vitality, of Giacomo Serpotta, enrich, among many others, the oratories of S. Zita, of S. Lorenzo, of the Rosary; the decoration in «mixed» marbles embellishes many churches, principally Casa Professa and S. Caterina. An urban reorganization of the old city is undertaken, with the opening and arrangement of streets and new organic quarters. Public services are instituted, among them night lighting - in 1744, viceroy Orsini - then unknown in many capitals of Europe. In the economic field must be recorded the international treaties to favor commerce, the increase in the extraction and exportation of sulfur, the flourishing of crafts, the birth of new industries. A road network, aimed at connecting the major centers with one another and with the capital, is laid out by reorganizing and improving the ancient royal «trazzere». In the Albergo dei poveri P. finds, in 1772, a modern welfare institution, housed in a building of Roman breadth.
Under the son and successor of the good King Charles, Ferdinand III, P. came to be embellished; with the gutting of Piazza Caracciolo there took place the disastrous neoclassical modernization of the Cathedral, due to Fuga. Through the work of the viceroy Caracciolo there were beneficial administrative and political upheavals; the old Neapolitan gentleman gave substance to local demands, especially in the field of the feudal order which, under the pressure of the strong bourgeoisie, slowly formed in the most populous and active fiefs, had acquired a particular character. Caracciolo also abolished (1702) the tribunal of the Inquisition, hated by the people. In the 15th century a Studium generale had been opened in the convent of St. Dominic; afterward instruction had passed to the Jesuits; but only in 1779 was the Regia Accademia degli Studi inaugurated in the Palazzo del Collegio Massimo, formerly Jesuit, which, transferred in 1805 to the convent of the Theatines, received the rank of University. P. was then adorned with the Villa Giulia (1777), the Botanical Garden (1789) and the astronomical Observatory (1790), made illustrious shortly afterward by Abbot Giuseppe Piazzi, who on the night of 1 January 1801 discovered the first planetoid, between Mars and Jupiter, which he named Ceres Ferdinandea. Ferdinand III fled from Naples to P. in 1799, and again in 1806. P. was then the theater of tortuous plots, whose principal protagonists were Queen Maria Carolina and Lord Bentinck, exponent of English policy, who wanted to take advantage of events to gain a foothold in Sicily.
The early 19th century opens with the poet Giovanni Meli, then come the naturalist and historiographer Domenico Scinà and the sculptor Valerio Villareale. There arose the oratory of the Olivella, by the architect G. Venanzio Marvuglia (1729-1811), the church of the Salvatore, by the architect Paolo Amato, and many palaces of the nobility.
V. PALERMO FROM THE FALL OF FEUDALISM
The new constitution of the English type, approved by Parliament after the nobility had, on 18 July 1812, abolished the feudal order, lived briefly. It was revoked, after the Congress of Vienna, by Ferdinand, who had become by an artificial formula first king of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The liberal ferment, already at work in the memorable renunciation of feudal privileges, ranged against the absolute monarchy the flower of the nobility and the great bourgeoisie of culture and property, endowed with eminent figures, through whose work P. knew one of the happiest moments of its own intellectual life. The insurrection of 1820 and that of 1848, under the guidance of this elite, turned to the interdependent end of the reconquest of the privileges of autonomy and the attainment of constitutional liberties. In both these upheavals P. was the driving center of popular action and the interpreter of the needs of the whole of Sicily. When the provisional government headed by Ruggero Settimo, "president of the Kingdom," fell in 1849, P. remained the hearth of the daring of the recovery. In the first decades of the unity of the Kingdom of Italy P., having remained the center of attraction of the entire Island - in 1861 it counted 213,909 inhabitants, who had become 309,935 in 1901 - saw the beginning of a new period of cultural development, through the impulse of educational institutions, principally the University, and of study associations, among them the Sicilian Society for Patria History. One records the great names of Michele Amari, Antonino Salinas, Giuseppe Pitrè, Monsignor Gioacchino Di Marzo, in historical-artistic erudition. No less was the economic and industrial development, principally through the fruitful initiatives of the Florio family. - See plates XLI-XLII.
Bibliography20 works
Biagio Pace