Just open a map, Sicily is the heart of the Mediterranean–geographically and, for centuries, politically too. The sea that now divides Europe from Africa and the Middle East, a frontier between states, a natural as well as a cultural boundary to be defended, has been a point of conjunction since a good 6,000 years before Christ.

Cradle of the civilizations that have thrived on its shores, united by a sea “in the midst of the lands” (as its very name implies), the Mediterranean has been above all a source of wealth and trade, a reservoir of resources, and the globalization of what was the then “known world.”