What is the largest island in the Mediterranean?

Sicily, and its position is its entire history - a stepping stone between Europe and Africa that controls the strait, so everybody took it. Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, Spanish, Bourbons and finally Italy, each leaving a layer.

The Norman period is the strangest and the best. Norman adventurers took the island from its Arab rulers in the eleventh century and then, instead of purging what they found, ran a court with Arabic, Greek and Latin as working languages, Muslim administrators, Byzantine mosaicists and Arab architects. Roger II's chapel in Palermo has a Latin plan, Byzantine mosaics and an Islamic honeycomb ceiling painted with scenes that no church elsewhere would have tolerated.

Etna is the other permanent fact. Europe's most active volcano has been erupting throughout recorded history, has repeatedly destroyed towns, and is the reason the soil is fertile enough that people keep rebuilding on it. The trade-off is explicit and ancient: farm the best land in the region and accept that the mountain will eventually come down it.