| The history - Alcamo
After having conquered Segesta, the Elimi also settled on Mount Bonifato that, 826 mt high, enabled them to protect by enemies. But when Segesta came under Roman rule, also the position of the mountain lost its strategic importance. In 827 the Arabs built a little castle on the mount and a downhill garrison that had the name of their emir: Al-Qamah, from which its actual name derives. The first official document, mentioning the town, write about a mazil (hamlet), so a conglomeration of houses, surrounded by fertile lands. In Norman age, the Arabs progressively left the area, the inhabitants of the mountain began to move to the hamlet, and Catholicism enormously spread through the population. Only under the rule of the Aragoneses, Alcamo acquired the appearance of a real town: the raids of the pirates were strongly fought, the walls with the four gates were built, and was planned a town establishment that could hold about three thousand inhabitants, many of them immigrants from everywhere in Italy. Also trades increased and Alcamo became, together with the rest of Sicily, the granary which the crown took its alimentary stores from. Carlo V , back from Tunisia, passed through here too, and, in his honour, one of the old gates was closed and four more were opened. Between the second half of the sixteenth-century and the seventeenth, the town was repeatedly hit by the Black Death and it ended by being sold by the Counts of Modica to the Prince of Roccafiorita. Also Alcamo gave its contribution to Italian Risorgimento: numerous Alcamo people took part in the insurrectional riots and from here, in 1860, Garibaldi proclaimed himself despot of Sicily.
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