“With clacking oars the Phoenicians arrived millennia ago to found their centre of ancient exchange. Under golden Roman yoke the port gained gleaming palaces and mosaics. Ostrogoths, vandals, and Byzantines alternately wrecked and rebuilt. Moorish and Berber emirs dug irrigation and harvested new fruits - the bergamot oranges they planted still grow. Norman kings wrested the island back from the east. Garibaldi’s thousand redshirts galloped through, and Italy was born. All those centuries of interleaved layers, one bled into the other, remain palpable in the air, the water, the art, the architecture, the spirit.”