Numbers Fun and Some History

Usually I put this kind of post right after my Intro post and before my Day Zero post, but here I decided to stash it in the middle area, mostly because we visited what today amounts to one country, Italy, and we all used our phones for most of the pictures, so counting the number of shots is difficult.

So...

Italy: Think of it: slightly bigger than Arizona, with 62 million people, or roughly twice the population of California.

Corrie took a few hundred, if not in the thousands, of pictures with her Nikon dSLR, and we took a few dozen Polaroids.

The history is rather well known, but not necessarily with regards to Sicily.

Sicily is only relatively recently been a part of Italy.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the peninsula was a bunch of tribal lands, the Papal states, and large, independent cities. By the time Garibaldi united the peninsula into what we today call Italy, in 1879, it had coalesced into this:

Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, and has been inhabited since 12000 BCE. The Phoenicians found a "native" population of folks who'd come in essentially pre-historic times, and the island has been controlled in part by the following groups dating back to about 500 BCE:

1. Phoenicians
2. Greek
3. Carthaginian (Punic) 
4. Romans
5. Germanic Peoples
6. Arabs
7. Normans
8. French
9. Spanish
10. Italians

Sicily is less Italian than a vast melting pot of Mediterranean, near-east and middle-east populations.