Misilmeri

The name comes from the Arabic Manzil al-Amir, the emir's resting place, and there really was an emir here, with a castle of which ruins remain. But the date that counts is 1068: here the Normans beat the Arab troops in a decisive battle that dissolved the Muslim authorities of the island and opened the road to the taking of Palermo four years later. Today's Misilmeri, though, is much more recent: it was refounded in the sixteenth century by baron Francesco Del Bosco, who turned it into a building site, opened the approach road to the castle and raised the mother church.

Two things happened here that the town has not forgotten. In 1692 the botanist Francesco Cupani founded what was then the largest botanical garden in Europe, and he did it for a purpose that seemed strange at the time: to grow herbs and plants that would ease the suffering of the poor of Misilmeri. When the botanical garden of Palermo was created, more than two thousand plants left from here; of the Giardino Grande nothing remains today but a plaque. And in 1860, before the Thousand entered Palermo, Garibaldi together with Nino Bixio and Giuseppe La Masa put together in this town the first committee ready to govern Italy: the main square is still called Comitato 1860, and it was on the hills just above that Garibaldi said to Bixio, Nino, tomorrow in Palermo. Misilmeri is also the town of Rocco Chinnici, the magistrate murdered by the mafia in 1983, to whom the town devotes a yearly prize for education in the rule of law.