Sicily is Mount Etna. The vast expanse of the cinder-coned, snow-streaked mountain dominates a verdant countryside of vineyards, olive trees, lemon and orange groves, and small hill towns. Etna is so physically preponderant (the baroque city of Catania is encircled with hardened piles of lava deposited by a seventeenth-century eruption that destroyed the city and killed most of its inhabitants) and metaphysically frightening that the early Sicilians avoided speaking directly about it four fear of invoking its wrath. Since the days of the Saracen rule of the island, the inhabitants have called it Mongibello, a name derived from Arabic meaning "mountain of mountains."
Down through the centuries, the menacing rule of Etna has been just one of the many forces that have controlled Sicily's destiny. The Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, French, Germans, Austrians, and Spanish all governed Sicily at various times. The ancient Greeks, who called the island Trinacria because of its triangular shape, made it a part of Magna Graecia; and later the Romans used its productive wheat fields as the breadbasket of Imperial Rome.
In the Middle Ages, Sicily became part of the Byzantine Empire until the Saracens from Africa raided the major cities and imposed an Arab domination over the island that lasted for more than 250 years. The seafaring Normans arrived in the eleventh century, defeated the Arabs, and ushered in a long succession of European rules who took turns lording over the Sicilians. And during World War II, Sicilians experienced the Anglo-American invasion that ended the tyranny of fascism.
Sicily's alien rulers were lured by the island's commercial and agricultural promise, and all the invaders spent their time creating the island in their own images. Many of the inhabitants served as actual slaves and were put to work building the colossal structures of the conquerors. Thus, Sicily today is filled with the ruins of Greek temples and theaters, the remains of Arabic and Roman mosaics, and the still-standing medieval churches of Norman and Byzantine design that contain awe-inspiring paintings and frescoes.
During centuries of often harsh and oppressive control, the foreign slavemasters made Sicilians pay an exorbitant price for being born on a beautiful and richly fecund island centrally located in the Mediterranean. The subjugating forces exploited the land and its people and left a mélange of blood lines and dominant cultural influences. But more than anything else they created an atmosphere of subordination in which Sicilian men and women were impelled to learn many of the survival techniques, such as the use of masks, role-playing, manipulation, and behavioral and language codes, commonly found in all slave societies.
Even today Sicilians often manifest the characteristics of an oppressed people, as observed in their taciturn behavior, fetish for secrecy, love of freedom, fierce individualism, and role-playing. These traits are expressed in the Sicilian disdain for the rules of established institutions, but loyalty to the sub rosa, lawless groups working against or in place of the legal order. Many of these attributes cohere in the centuries-old Mafia, which exists as the embodiment of the Sicilians' survival qualities - and serves as an outlet for the excessive practices of a few individuals' hostile
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