Italy's national airline wipes Sicily off the map

Italian airline Alitalia has apologised after a passenger browsing a route map in its inflight magazine spotted that Sicily was missing. The passenger said she was particularly alarmed since she was on a flight from Rome to the Sicilian city of Catania at the time.

Smaller islands such as Sardinia, Malta and Ibiza were all in their correct places on the international map, making the disappearance of Sicily - Italy's largest region and the biggest island in the Mediterranean - even more bewildering.

A Radical party senator, Riccardo Villari, took up the case on behalf of Sicily's 5 million inhabitants and demanded the intervention of the transport ministry. "Silvio Berlusconi based his election campaign on saving Alitalia and there has been an enormous advertising campaign to relaunch its image … only to result in unpleasant errors," he said.



The magazine's editor, Aldo Canale, said the missing island was "just a silly printing mistake". "We've run lots of editions on the beauty of Sicily and we would never dream of eliminating it from maps of Italy," he said.

Alitalia meanwhile defended its 30-year-old inflight monthly, Ulisse, and blamed the error on a new production system. "Ulisse is a historic magazine. This has never happened before and won't happen again," the airline told Corriere della Sera.

Sicily's tourism chief, Giambattista Bufardeci, accepted the explanations but said the damage done to Sicily's image remained serious.