Touring the ruins of Selinunte in the 1970s, my sister and I were picked up by a young Sicilian. Al Pacino in The Godfather he was not: he had red hair, freckles and the sun-blistered skin of a fisherman.

Selinunte was founded in the seventh century BC as the Greek colony of Selinous, but the genes of this young fisherman were not Greek. They were a legacy of Sicily’s other great settlers, the Normans, who share the cultural spotlight in this new British Museum exhibition (until 14 August).

I say “cultural” because this fertile volcanic island in the mid-Mediterranean was conquered in the course of two millennia by Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese, Habsburgs and Bourbons. But the Greeks and the Normans – from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries – presided over its two golden ages.