The Castello Normanno - Svevo di Aci a few Kilometers north of Catania in Sicily For almost eight hundred years, precisely from 1071 to 1861, Italy was split in two. To the north was Venice, Milan, Savoy, Tuscany, Siena and tha Papal State. To the south the Kingdom of Sicily. The north was fractured. The south unified. How was this possible? The population in the north was homogeneous. In the south there were Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Arabic Jews and Normans. You would assume th

Castello Aragonese d'Ischia was first built by Hieron, the Ruler of Syracuse, in 474 BC When sailing around the Golf of Naples, you may notice the many Aragon (it merged in 1479 with Castile and became Spanish) castles sitting prominently on rocky outcrops high above the waves. Why are they there and what was their purpose? We will have the chance to visit many of them during our third week of sailing this September. More surprisingly is that many of them were modernized duri