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50 free Sicily trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sicily trivia for anyone who has stood on the slopes of Etna, eaten a cannolo in Palermo, watched The Leopard or Cinema Paradiso, or traced their family back to the island. The quiz begins with geography: the triangle the Greeks called Trinacria, the Strait of Messina, the volcanoes, the record-setting heat, and the mountains that are really the tail of the Apennines. Then it moves through three thousand years of arrivals. Sicels and Elymians, Phoenicians and Greeks, Archimedes defending Syracuse against Rome, Arab emirs who brought lemons and pistachios, Norman kings whose court outshone England, Frederick II and his poets, the Vespers uprising, Aragon and Spain, Garibaldi landing at Marsala, and the twentieth-century fight against the Mafia. It finishes with the culture: the puppet theatre, the painted carts, Bellini and the Teatro Massimo, Pirandello and Camilleri, Nero d'Avola and Marsala, and the Medusa-headed triskelion on the flag. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Italy, Rome, ancient Greece and volcano quizzes.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which city is the capital of Sicily?
Palermo
About 1.2 million of the island's 4.7 million people live in and around it.
Q 02Sicily takes its name from which Iron Age people who lived in the east of the island?
The Sicels
The Sicani were there first, arriving (according to Thucydides) from the Iberian Peninsula.
Q 03What was the ancient Greek name for Sicily, referring to its three headlands?
Trinacria
The three-legged triskelion on the modern flag still stands for those three capes.
Q 04What is Sicily's most prominent landmark and Europe's tallest active volcano?
Mount Etna
It stood 3,403 metres high as of 2024, roughly two and a half times the height of Vesuvius.
Q 05What separates Sicily from Calabria on the Italian mainland?
The Strait of Messina
It narrows to about 3 km at its northern end, and a record suspension bridge across it is now planned for 2032.
Q 06Which Greek monster did Zeus trap beneath Sicily's great volcano, according to myth?
Typhon
Its recurrent eruptions still cast black ash across the island.
Q 07Sicily's volcanoes are explained by the island sitting on the northern edge of which tectonic feature?
The African Plate
The Aeolian Islands to the north-east form a second volcanic complex including Stromboli.
Q 08What temperature, a European record, was recorded in south-east Sicily on 11 August 2021?
48.8 °C
The unofficial 48.5 °C reading at Catenanuova in 1999 had long been the island's benchmark.
Q 09The Castagno dei Cento Cavalli on Etna is claimed as the world's largest and oldest known what?
Chestnut tree
It is thought to be somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 years old.
Q 10Which endemic animal was driven to extinction on the island in the 20th century?
A wolf subspecies
Roe deer had already vanished from the island; a dwarf elephant lived there until about 20,000 years ago.
Q 11Which was the most important Greek colony in Sicily?
Syracuse
Athens sent its disastrous Sicilian Expedition against it in 415-413 BC and lost an entire army and fleet.
Q 12Which mathematician helped defend his home city and was killed when Rome captured it in 212 BC?
Archimedes
He is one of the reasons Sicily is called part of Magna Graecia rather than an outpost of it.
Q 13Sicily became Rome's earliest province outside the Italian peninsula after which war?
The First Punic War
Syracuse held out as an ally until it switched sides in the next war and was besieged.
Q 21The poets of the Sicilian School at the Hohenstaufen court are credited with inventing which verse form?
The sonnet
Giacomo da Lentini gets the credit; the group wrote more than 300 courtly love poems between 1230 and 1266.
Q 22The 1282 uprising that drove the French from Sicily is known by what name?
The Sicilian Vespers
Sicilians then turned to Peter III of Aragon, and the island stayed in Aragonese and Spanish hands for centuries.
Q 23The Black Death first arrived in Europe in October 1347 at which Sicilian port?
Messina
The same city was flattened by an earthquake in 1908 that killed more than 80,000 people.
Q 14Which Roman orator's speeches against the corrupt governor Verres were delivered in 70 BC?
Cicero
The In Verrem orations were prompted by Sicily's sharp decline during Verres's three years in charge.
Q 15Under Arab rule the island was divided into three 'vals'. Which one covered the west?
Val di Mazara
Val Demone in the north-east stayed largely Christian and rebellious throughout the emirate.
Q 16The extinct Siculo-Arabic spoken in Sicily developed into which modern language?
Maltese
Ibn Hawqal, an Arab merchant who visited Palermo in 950, counted 7,000 butchers in the city.
Q 17Which crops did Muslim rule introduce to Sicily?
Lemons, oranges and pistachios
They also brought sugar cane, cotton and mulberries for silk, plus the qanat irrigation system.
Q 18The Norman conquest of Sicily was completed in 1091 with the capture of which last Arab stronghold?
Noto
Roger I had landed at Messina in 1061 with just 700 knights; the decisive moment was the fall of the capital in 1071.
Q 19Which Norman ruler raised Sicily to a kingdom in 1130?
Roger II
His court was reckoned wealthier than the Kingdom of England and issued laws in Arabic, Greek and Latin as needed.
Q 20Which Hohenstaufen emperor was crowned King of Sicily in 1198 aged four?
Frederick II
He grew up running the streets of Palermo, picking up Arabic and Greek, and dismissed the papal regent at twelve.
Q 24The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 handed Sicily to which royal house, for just seven years?
Savoy
They swapped it for Sardinia with the Austrian emperor Charles VI.
Q 25Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand began its conquest of Sicily in 1860 by landing at which town?
Marsala
The same town gives its name to Sicily's famous fortified wine.
Q 26On what date did the Allied invasion of Sicily begin during the Second World War?
10 July 1943
The landings helped trigger the 25 July crisis that toppled Mussolini.
Q 27Which fascist-era 'Iron Prefect' led the first successful campaign against the Mafia?
Cesare Mori
Falcone and Borsellino led the next big campaign in the 1980s.
Q 28Sicily is one of how many autonomous regions of Italy?
Five
It was given special status on 15 May 1946, eighteen days before the referendum that made Italy a republic.
Q 29Which Sicilian region contains the richest and largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world?
Villa Romana del Casale
The 4th-century villa sits about 3 km outside Piazza Armerina and became a World Heritage Site in 1997.
Q 30The Valley of the Temples, one of Sicily's UNESCO sites, is located at which city?
Agrigento
The Greeks knew the city as Akragas.