The history of Trapani: between myth and reality

Trapani, the city shaped like a sickle, traces its origins back to Greco-Roman mythology. According to Roman Mythology, the city of Trapani arose from the sickle fallen from the goddess Ceres while she was flying over the skies of Sicily on her winged chariot in search of her daughter Proserpina: the sickle falling into the sea transformed into a land tongue shaped like a sickle on which a city arose, hence its name Drepanon ("sickle" in ancient Greek). Trapani is also known as the city bathed by two seas, located at the extreme tip of western Sicily, it rises indeed on a land tongue bathed on one side by the Sicilian Channel (the Mediterranean Sea), and on the other by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Trapani is also the City of Salt, the white gold of Sicily, and the city of fishing par excellence, linked for millennia to this primary activity of the red tuna slaughter. A city dominated and crossed by a vast mixture of peoples and cultures, which over time have transformed and influenced the territory: the Carthaginians, who made Trapani an important port for controlling various commercial docks and financed the construction of walls and fortifications until the end of the First Punic War; the Romans; the Arabs who deeply marked the city with their presence, in architecture, agriculture, art, language, and culture; the Normans, under whom Trapani experienced a great period of prosperity; the Spanish, creators of the Tower of Ligny, one of the symbols of the city of Trapani.