Islamic Art - The Barakat Trust
S6E9: Sicily's Islamic Past between Rural and Urban, with Nicolò Pini
Earlier in the summer we reported on the completion of Nicolò Pini’s project “Living in Late Antique rural Sicily, between Byzantium and Islam” which was supported by The Barakat Trust in 2024. Now, we are delighted to welcome Nicolò on to the podcast where he discusses in more detail the context of his dig and the importance of tracking developments in rural areas to uncover Sicily’s medieval past. Nicolò’s dig took place at Terravecchia di Caltavuturo on the top of a hill to the east of Palermo, the island’s capital. He shows how the results of his team’s excavations could contribute to a richer understanding of how populations lived under Islamic rule and beyond. Nicolò’s project and team, with support from The Barakat Trust, has been able to kick start an effort to return to rural archaeology on the Mediterranean’s largest island where results from other similar sites and future excavations can contribute to the bigger picture of how Sicily’s landscape and population changed under Islamic rule and after the return of the Normans. The team were able to produce a 3D scan of the project which you can explore here: https://skfb.ly/pznAY Nicolò Pini is classical archaeologist by training who has spent the past decade working at the chronological and cultural margins of the discipline — in the Late Antique and Early Islamic Near East. He received his PhD in 2017 from the University of Cologne with a thesis on Arab settlements in Late Antique and early Islamic periods. He has since held postdoctoral positions at universities in Brussels and Bonn. This episode is part of our series Peripheries which seeks to push our understanding of the cultural heritage of the Islamic world away from the traditional centres that we associate with it. With a fantastic range of guests we will examine places and topics often considered peripheral to the Islamic world and understand why they are in fact of central importance to the region’s cultural heritage, from Armenia to England, from Ethiopia to West Africa.
