SEFS 5 Venue

Palermo is the capital of Sicily and the fifth largest city in Italy (about 700,000 inhabitants, and over a million if we include the suburbs). In the middle of the Mediterranean sea, Palermo - the cradle of ancient civilizations - has always been a crossroads of cultures between East and West: a strategic transit place, a privileged port of call for commerce and trade, a landing-place for people of various races, languages, and religions. Palermo has always enchanted visitors and foreigners with the charm of its location, the mildness of its climate, and the splendour of its buildings. And for these same reasons it has, over the centuries, been dominated by a succession of different rulers.
Humans were present in Palermo at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch, about 10,000 years ago. Cave drawings confirm a presence by 6000 BC, if not earlier, and there is no evidence to suggest anything but a continuous presence since that period. In any case, Palermo is one of the few cities in the world that has preserved considerable traces of the culture of its successive conquerors: from the Phoenicians to the Romans and the Byzantines, from the Arabs to the Normans, from the Swabians to the French, from the Spaniards to the Austrians, they have all left unmistakable marks of their passing; and these are invaluable testimonies, since this convergence of different styles and shapes and cultures, from the North of Europe to Africa, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque period, has given birth to a variety of absolutely original artistic, architectural, and decorative creations as well as to…a peculiar gastronomy.
Palermo, whose airport is well connected to Milan and Rome, is also a convenient gate to visit Sicily and its Greek remains (the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, and some of the biggest Greek towns of the antiquity as Selinunte and Siracusa) and its naturalistic peculiarities such as the Etna Volcano, the Rivers Alcantara and Ciane, and the Eolian islands.

Moreover, Palermo is linked to freshwater sciences through the very famous paper by G.E. Hutchinson "Homage to Santa Rosalia or why are there so many kind of animals" (The American Naturalist, 1959, 93:145-159) where he writes that "we may take Santa Rosalia as the patroness of evolutionary studies".
Actually, Santa Rosalia is the chief patroness of Palermo and a big celebration in her honour takes place in mid-July every year, since 1624.
The fame of the Festino - as the festivity is called by the local population - is due to the sense of magnificence that the civil and religious authorities, expressing the wish of the people, desired to create in their intent to demonstrate Palermo's profound gratitude to the Saint who had saved the city from a great pestilence in the year 1624.