Episode list

Historian Michael Scott visits sites in Sicily to study how well 'welcoming' waves of foreign immigrants and influences worked out to create the 'wonder'. The Syracuse cathedral, started as a temple and architecturally adapted after various invasions, serves as perfect monument to cultural enrichment. The eldest known tribes like the probably eponymous Siculi played a minor part, as two major Mediterranean civilizations settled on the largest and central island, both divided. The first wave of Phoenicians, establishing city states with refugees from the Levant where Hellenism was to take over, very open to local and North African influences and adopting much from Greek art, was overtaken by the rise of Carthage, based in present Tunisia, apparently practicing human (child) sacrifices. The rivalry continued with various Greek colonies becoming major polis states themselves, mostly in conflict among themselves too, but uniting to expel the Carthaginians. Yet their own rivalry would incur the final overthrow by inviting Romans, who turned Sicily, never recognized as properly Italic, into their first exploited province, mainly a granary for the mob in Rome. As empire declined, Greek speaking Sicily fell to the Byzantine empire, whose Constans II the bearded even started moving is capital to Syracuse to ward off the Muslim threat, but was murdered, allegedly by his Sicilian barber.

As Byzantine power crumbled, a rebel governor invited Moors from Northern Africa, who ended up turning the whole island into an exceptionally tolerant Muslim emirate, establishing a new capital at Palermo, which became a rich, cosmopolitan, major European metropolis. While duke William of Normandy conquered England swiftly, the Hauteville family from his converted Vikings nobility joined the Crusades, and managed with great effort to turn Sicily into a crusader kingdom. It fell to the Staufian imperial dynasty of Henry VI, then after an Anjou Neapolitan intermezzo five centuries under Aragon's Spanish-Catalan rule. They introduced the Spanish Inquisition, a regime of Catholic intolerance and persecution of Jews and heretics. The Bourbon house of Spain was evicted as Garibaldi started his 19th century reunification of Italy in Syracuse, but under Italian rule a new scourge emerged from within: the mafia. Cultures continue to mix and foreigners to immigrate into the cosmopolitan island, even when right wing parties in Rome call for a fortress Europe.