Palermo

History & Origin

The city of Palermo has been the capital of Sicily for more than two thousand years, and its name has an even longer history. The Greeks called it Panormos — meaning "all harbour" or "completely enclosed harbour" — a reference to the natural bay that made it one of the finest ports in the Mediterranean. Through Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Arab, Norman, and Spanish rule, the city kept its dominant position as Sicily's political and commercial centre.

Under Arab rule in the ninth and tenth centuries, Palermo was one of the most sophisticated cities in Europe — a place of libraries, gardens, and fountains that awed visitors from the Christian north. Under the Normans, who conquered Sicily in the eleventh century, it became the seat of a court that combined Byzantine art, Arab science, and Norman administration in a unique cultural synthesis. Roger II's cathedral and the Palazzo dei Normanni remain as witnesses to this extraordinary moment.

As a surname, Palermo was taken by families who came from the city — emigrants within Sicily who moved to the mainland, or who identified themselves by their great metropolitan origin in a diaspora community. In Italian-American New York, Palermitan neighbourhoods had their own bakeries, their own dialect, their own saint's feast days.

Palermo, Wisconsin — a small town — was named by Italian immigrants from the city, one of hundreds of American settlements where Sicilian emigrants recreated their geography in the New World.

In the Diaspora

To bear the name Palermo is to carry one of the great cities of Mediterranean civilization — a city that was sophisticated and cosmopolitan when northern Europe was still largely illiterate. If your family came from Palermo, they came from a place that knew itself to be the centre of the world.

Spelling Variants

The Palermo surname appears in various forms across Italy and its diaspora:

• Di Palermo
• Palermino
• Palermi
• Palermitano