Sicilians
The Spanish era ended in 1735, when Charles V was crowned king. For the better part of the next century-and-a-half, Sicily was in personal union with the other Southern Italian Kingdom of Naples, with the official residence located in Naples. In 1861, however, Sicily became part of the Kingdom of Italy as a result of the Risorgimento. After the unification of Italy and the Fascist era, a wave of Sicilian nationalism led to the adoption of the Statute of Sicily, under which the island has become an autonomous region. Since 1946, the island enjoys the most advanced special status of all the autonomous regions, which allows the Sicilian residents to keep 100% of the revenue from all the taxes, without giving back any to the central government in Rome.
Sicilians
As the Roman Empire was falling apart, a Germanic tribe known as the Vandals took over Sicily in 468 AD (after taking Carthage in 439 they tried several times but failed to take the island) under the rule of their king Geiseric. However, they soon lost these newly acquired possessions, except one toehole in Lilybaeum, to Odoacer in 476 and completely to the Ostrogothic conquest of Sicily by Theodoric the Great which began in 488; although the Goths were Germanic, Theodoric sought to revive Roman culture and government and allowed freedom of religion. The Gothic War took place between the Ostrogoths and the Byzantine Empire, and during the reign of Justinian I, Sicily was brought back under Greco-Roman rule, and Greek language and religion were embraced by the majority of the population. It was Syracuse where the Byzantine Emperor Constans II desired to move his capital in 663 AD, a decision which eventually led to his assassination. Sicily remained under Byzantine rule for several centuries, until an invasion by Arab Muslims (Aghlabids) in the 9th century. The Muslim conquest was a see-saw affair; the local population resisted fiercely and the Arabs suffered considerable dissension and infighting among themselves. Not until 965 was the island's conquest successfully completed, with Syracuse in particular resisting almost to the end.