Piazza Armerina

Inside Sicily, as if to interrupt the mining and arid nature of the central plateau, there is Piazza Armerina: almost an ocher-colored brushstroke stretched between the light green hills of the Erei Mountains. One of the main tourist resorts on the island, with over twenty-two thousand inhabitants and a territory of about thirty thousand hectares inserted in a splendid environmental and archaeological scenario.

The history of the city is known starting from the Norman settlement in Sicily: revealed by the numerous works of art, the traditions, the chronicles of the time and even by the characteristic Gallo-Italic spoken of the piazzesi. We thus know, for example, of wars between Christians and Saracens, of revolts stifled with weapons, of the destruction of the old city and its reconstruction which occurred in the late twelfth century.

In the following centuries Piazza Armerina experienced all the Sicilian historical events: the Swabian domination, the Angevin and the Aragonese domination, the Spanish viceroy, the Bourbon domination, the Risorgimento uprisings, and finally the more recent history to which the elderly are still witnesses. But it is the city itself that preserves its past to reveal it to the most attentive visitors, who, in a journey back in time, will be enchanted in front of the splendor of the churches and the monuments and the polychrome mosaics of the Villa Romana del Casale.

And just the magic of past centuries will involve you along the streets of the historic center; climbing among the medieval streets, you will be amazed admiring the suggestive size of the Cathedral that dominates the city, the elegance of the Palazzo Trigona and the severity of the Aragonese Castle.

You will discover the charm of getting lost in the dense and suggestive ups and downs of streets and alleys, in search of the elegant buildings and churches that hide behind every corner: only in this way can you say that you have visited Piazza Armerina.