Paul Mellon Lecture - Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, February 2016

[@Joe-ju4cj]

John Julius Norwich is awesome! The best works on the Normans in Sicily and loved his books on Byzantium. He in my opinion writes history as it should be written.

[@redberries8039]

Absolutely agree. My copy of Byzantium has been thumbed ragged.

[@friendlyfire7861]

Definitely. One of the most enjoyable historians to read, and he is very deep.

[@YouMeandSicily]

Very true!

[@paulabennett4788]

Loved this so much and what a brilliant lecture. Will go to Sicily A.S.A.P. and try to remember this amazing.information. Fascinating. Thank you 😅😅.

[@willsteel1631]

I love the history of Sicily, thank you Paul Mellon.

[@cindymaceda2999]

I’m binge-watching every lecture & history documentary about Sicily because we will visit it, hopefully soon.

[@Zomrem]

Just terrific. Leaving for Sicily in about a month and so glad that I saw this first.

[@lisalanza8365]

We are the descendants of Giovanna Lanza DiPaterno of Trabia ,Sicily. My cousin met her in the 1970s on a trip with her Grandfather, Vincent Lanza. A servant answered the door and had us sit in the parlor. She observed the family crest carved into an archway. She saw a picture of Princess Giovanna wearing a gown a crown and holding a scepter. She entered the room and family conversation ensued in Sicilian,which she did not speak or understand. My Grandfather always said we were descendants from Royalty but this was the proof. We are descendants of the Duke of Bavaria from over 1000 years ago. The family mansion is now a museum

[@joslynaarons6885]

Congratulations for being able to find and touched your roots. This must have been quite an experience.

[@s1lentsound]

​took the words out of my mouth 😂

[@nickprohoroff3720]

Pure Class.What a treat.

[@annascott3542]

Delightful lecture & lecturer, thank you!

[@Ginzaloon]

Very knowledgeable lecture, thanks for posting this and best piece on Siciliy I can find on KZbin

[@decem_sagittae]

Rest in peace, Lord Norwich.

[@king_cobra5492]

Excellent

[@rubenjames7345]

Very well done. Full marks.

[@jamesjefferson9228]

Love this kind of posh, erudite, witty, British rhetoric

[@gregorythomas2674]

Wonderful and insightful presentation! Grazie!!! 😊🇮🇹

[@woody020354]

Excellent content and presentation.

[@eugeniobb]

beautifully summed up

[@wilsontheconqueror8101]

His knowledge of the reign of Roger of Sicily and his heirs is outstanding!

[@ThePerradox]

R.I.P. John Julius Norwich.

[@wp9860]

An absolutely wonderful talk, punctuated with mounds of that famous understated British humor.

[@MrElliotc02]

We won't see his like again...

[@bwoutchannel6356]

Sicily as I know it and Sicilians as I know them well are not content as the word itself implies. Proud, weathered, resourceful in their minimalistic needs they suffer non the less with a ruling North that gives little benefit to that greater part of the Italian dynamic. I once heard it said, by someone I deeply respected, that the Northern part of all countries cause their Southern parts to languish inevitably.

[@Samuel-op7tn]

England is the opposite..

[@dougcortes6567]

@@Samuel-op7tn My thought, exactly. You could say the same of Canada.

[@AstridGerecke]

This is a well written conférences. But why did he leave out Frédéric II altogether? It would de interested.

[@David-mz8xk]

He's in his book

[@ROBBANKS666666]

Wow 🤩

[@bramsonneveld1898]

Vicount is pronounced as vaikownt and not as veekownt, as Joshua David does.

[@bobbyshull123]

Keep it up dude!

[@TommyTheWalker]

I'm Sicilian, believe we're not happy

[@nurlatifahmohdnor8939]

Page v Foreword December 1980. Copyright (C) 1964 Corine Jacker. Translated by A. Majid Latiff 1st print, 1981.

[@TeoOfficial_1]

My mother land for the universe to know

[@cor-z8m]

Sicilian first then Italian.

[@faerie5926]

I'm learning about Sicily for a really stupid reason

[@maxsavage3998]

Theres no stupid reason

[@timothysoar1321]

Largest island in Mediterranean apart from Australia

[@KittyComoMeow]

Corn? Corn wasn’t introduced to Europe until Columbus brought it back.

[@sandrodimarco2228]

I had read and enjoyed tremendously Norwich’s book ‘The Kingdom in the Sun’ and found this lecture astonishingly superficial and randomly put together. Granted that it is very hard to summarize 2,500 of history in 50 minutes Norwich seems to take a bizarre number of “creative” liberties in recounting the history of the island. His entire retelling of the years of the Bourbon kingdom and the invasion of the Piedmontese are almost laughable. Very unfortunate and disappointing! Among the many surreal imprecisions, Sicily was not a Spanish “colony” but rather a joined kingdom, which granted the island several significant privileges. These privileges are visible in the rich Baroque heritage that has been left from those years (which Norwich surprisingly defines as full of nothing). The entire southern section of the island is full of fantastic jewels of Baroque architecture dating from that time, which have been recognized as UNESCO heritage sites……so much for a heritage of nothing!!!

[@decem_sagittae]

You're a first class asshole my dude. Talking dirt on Lord Norwich right after his death. That's very low and beyond despicable. This wasn't even an academic lecture, it was meant for a more general audience, hence why it's "superficial", ie lighter and of a more introductive nature. Again my dude, you're a fucking asshole.

[@fulippuannaghiti1965]

I don't know if you're Sicilian or even Italian, but I'm telling you as a Sicilian that Lord Norwich did a fantastic job in transforming a complicated and twisted historical period into a comprehensible story about one of the most controversial island in the world. I read the Norman in the south and the Kingdom in the sun, I was amazed how a foreigner had at some point even a patriotic feeling for a land that Sicilians don't deserve because they can't even be bothered to study its history. P.S Here he was promoting his book and he could not obviously cover every single page of Sicilian history, otherwise he would have needed one week. You can't compare the period started from the Greek colonization until the Norman Kingdom which is considered as the golden age of the island. The Spaniards treated Sicily as a colony, Palermo was not the capital of an independent kingdom as it was during the Norman rule. Barocco is an artistic way of conceiving art in all its forms, mainly in architectural designs as we see in Sicily. But some baroque churches don't certainly mean any financial or cultural splendor. If you studied and compared the Sicilian golden age and the Spaniard colonization you will realise what abyss divides these two periods. RIP lord Norwich.

[@manitheman0806]

But of course, they weren't relevant in those years under the Bourbons....This is their achievements...A few achievements in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies relative to the other Italian states, particularly during the nineteenth century: • First pension system in what became Italy (2% deduction from salaries) • Most printing presses of any Italian city (Naples with 113) • Lowest taxes in Italy • Largest naval yards based on number of employees (1900 in Castellammare di Stabia) • Largest iron and steel engineering/manufacturing plant in Italy (at Pietrarsa) • Largest iron casting foundry in Italy (Ferdinandea in Calabria) • Oldest continuously-active opera house in Europe, the San Carlo in Naples (1737, rebuilt in 1816) • First university chair and department in economics (Antonio Genovesi, Naples, 1754) • Dwarf planet Ceres first observed (Giuseppe Piazzi, Palermo 1801) • First constitution in Italy (Sicily in 1812, later suspended) • First steamship in the Mediterranean, the Ferdinando I (1818) • First glass recycling program (1832) • First steel suspension bridge in Italy (Gagliano River in 1832, components from Mongiana Works) • First gas-fuelled public lighting system (1839) • First railroad in Italy (1839) • First seismic observatory in the world (Vesuvius 1841) • First steamboat with screw propulsion in the Mediterranean (the Giglio delle Onde 1847) • First functioning electric telegraph in Italy (1852) • Ranked 3rd country in the world for industrial development (1st in Italy) at Paris International Exhibition (1856) • First submarine telegraph in Europe • First military steamship in Italy (the Ercole) • First maritime code in Italy • First public housing complex/estate in Italy (San Leucio near Caserta) • Highest per capita number of physicians in Italy • First botanical gardens in Italy (Naples and then Palermo) • First school for the deaf in Italy • Lowest infant mortality rate in Italy (1850-1860)

[@yaylah7314]

Just because there were a couple of, indeed beautifully designed, churches doesn't mean that the rest of the population wasn't left to poverty whilst scraping through the day.

[@sandrodimarco2228]

@@fulippuannaghiti1965 >>The Spaniards treated Sicily as a colony. I don’t think this is an accurate depiction of the state of things in Sicily during the association with the Spanish kingdom for multiple reasons that would take a book to illustrate. This is a classic interpretation of the history of Sicily (the world) provided by the British historians who have the tendency to put down anything associated with Spain through the 15th/16th and 17th century. Have you ever seen/studied a Spanish colony? How does it compare to Sicily? The wealth of the island through the 16th and 17th century, the amount of construction that went on (just one example.....the entire reconstruction of the Val Di Noto in less than half a century with sumptuous buildings) give the idea of how Spain treated Sicily (not as a colony). You will not find similar examples of wealth neither in Spain nor in any of the real colonies. The truth is Sicily was associated to the Spanish throne, paid taxes, sure, but enjoyed a significant level of autonomy and wealth. Take a look at what happened after the “unification” with Italy....now, if you see the repercussions on the economy, on the demographics, on the state of the island, THAT was a period when Sicily became a colony!

[@mbc4240]

Sicily never produced "corn" for Imperial Rome, simply because corn was introduced when Rome Empire was long gone (14xx).

[@irenegilodi7180]

That would be true in American English, but in British English corn refers in general to any type of grain and cereal crops (such as wheat, largely cultivated in Sicily)

[@YouMeandSicily]

@@irenegilodi7180 Good point!

[@mbc4240]

@charleswhite758 On which point do you wish to insult me? I was naively, as @kenegilodi points out, using the American English meaning of "corn". No I don't know the nifty details of British Laws and History for that matter. Does that make me less Erudite than individuals of your pompous breed?

[@tomnichols4741]

Napoleon was actually above average height at the time. His "shortness" was always a myth. Lost a little respect at that height comment.

[@nicolasgentile3177]

I love the British historians, they're always funny and enjoyable. However, one must always put the correctness first. To assert that nothing happened during the Spanish vicerealm in Sicily is enormously incorrect. Sicily knew a great demographic growth during the XVIth century and the first half of the XVIIth century. Many monuments in Palermo show this economic and cultural growth. But most is lost after the destruction of Messina, probability the richest city in Sicily during that time, because its rebellion against the Spanish and the numerous earthquake. The extraordinary the reconstruction of the eastern Sicily after the 1693 earthquake could not be possible without the cultural and economic premises developed in the previous decades. I mean, this is well known, but I suppose the English scholars are still anti Spanish 😂 since the Armada... Also, the mosaics are not the only thing left in piazza Armerina Roman villa. There are almost intact rooms and even 2/3m high walls... Has he ever visited the villa?

[@manitheman0806]

Thank you for your reply....Great information

[@emerdigiorgio3594]

@ Nicolas: Good point! Thanks!👏

[@maxsavage3998]

The spaniards and Napoleon were aholes

[@InfoRome]

His point is that the period of Spanish rule is boring compared to what was there before.

[@bobbyshull123]

Yo sick vid

[@wild8074]

Mafia is just Government😉

[@schaefer220]

There wasn’t corn in Europe until after Europeans reached the Americas. He stated Sicily sent primarily corn to Rome..

[@petera618]

Not so much anymore, but the term corn used to be used to describe grain by the British. I'm sure he was referring to wheat. Sicily did serve as a granary to Rome.

[@mnz145]

It was wheat not corn.

[@emerdigiorgio3594]

@ schaefer 220...He meant wheat.

[@emerdigiorgio3594]

@@petera618 👍

[@YouMeandSicily]

@@petera618 true!

[@paulkehoe3425]

sicilian history is a lot longer than 3000 yrs!

[@charlesfenwick6554]

Before 700 BC Sicily was prehistory.

[@seravol1]

Sicily beautiful