RIYADH, 26 January 2004 — Italian Arab links have been highlighted at an exhibition entitled “Islam in Sicily,” which opened at the Murabha Palace in the King Abdul Aziz Historical Center here yesterday. The exhibition was opened by Prince Abdul Aziz ibn Salman, undersecretary for petroleum affairs at the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral Resources.
Italian Ambassador Armando Sanguini told Arab News that this was the first showing of the exhibition in the Gulf. The exhibition will not, however, come to Jeddah. It is sponsored by the Italian Embassy in conjunction with the General Presidency of Youth Welfare and the King Abdul Aziz Foundation of which Riyadh Governor Prince Salman is president.
The monthlong exhibition has already appeared in Tunisia, Morocco, Yemen and Syria.
The island of Sicily, strategically located in the Mediterranean, made it a cultural crossroads which saw successive waves of invaders. Between the 9th and 12th centuries two great civilizations, the Arabs and the Normans, met and mingled, laying the basis of the Sicily of today.
The presence of several Islamic sites in Sicily, the ambassador said, demonstrates the depth of the island’s Islamic heritage as do Arabic inscriptions, vestiges of Islamic architecture and the spectacular incorporation of Islamic styles into churches and palaces built by the Norman dynasty that overthrew Arab rule in Sicily.
The finest are the Palatine Chapel and rooms in the 12th century royal palace in Palermo and the Zisa, the Norman kings’ summer palace. The names of Sicilian town also testify to the Arab link such as the port of Marsala on the west of the island and the town of Catania in the east; it is derived from Al-Qahtani, the ambassador said.
Italy’s first modern-day mosque was opened in 1980 in Catania.
