Arancina from a street cart at Ballarò, panino con la milza from Antica Focacceria San Francesco, and Arab-Norman mosaics in a cathedral built when Sicily spoke three languages at once
Palermo is the most hybrid city in the Mediterranean — the capital of Sicily has been consecutively ruled by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Germans (Hohenstaufen), French Angevins, Spanish Aragonese, Bourbons, and the Italian state since 1860, and each successive power left food and architecture that didn't replace the previous but layered on top of it. The result is the most culturally specific street food in Europe: arancina (a rice croquette, filled with ragù or butter and béchamel, coated in breadcrumb and deep-fried — note the Palermo vs Catania war over the name: Palermita…
Palermo was founded by the Phoenicians (approximately 734 BC, one generation after Carthage) as a natural harbour at the meeting of the Papireto and Kemonia rivers. The Arab Emirate of Sicily (831–1072) — established when the Aghlabid dynasty of Tunisia captured the city from the Byzantines — made Palermo the third-largest city in Europe after Constantinople and Córdoba, with a population estimated at 300,000, a palace city (the Palazzo dei Normanni, then the Qasr al-Khassa), and a garden system (the Genoard, from the Arabic jannāt al-arḍ, 'paradise of Earth') that introduced citrus, sugarcan…