Three days in Palermo: a chapel where Arab, Greek and Norman craftsmen worked on one ceiling

Two nights in the old city, with the greatest Norman mosaics in Europe, eight thousand mummies in a crypt, and street food eaten standing up in a market.

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Length
3 days, 2 nights
Where you stay
Palermo
Places
7 across 3 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Palermo has been Phoenician, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, German, French, Spanish and finally Italian, and it did not tidy up between owners. The result is a city where a Norman king's private chapel has a Byzantine Christ in the dome, a Fatimid honeycomb ceiling above the nave, and an Arabic inscription round the base, all commissioned at once by the same man because those were the best craftsmen available.

It is also shabby, chaotic and half bombed. The Allies flattened parts of the old centre in 1943 and some of the gaps are still gaps, with grass growing out of baroque facades. That is not a reason to stay away. It is the most interesting city in Sicily and the one where three days feel short.

The food, sold in the street and eaten with your hands, is a large part of the argument. Palermo has the best street food in Italy and the most alarming, and both facts are the same fact.

Highlights

  • A royal chapel built in the 1130s by a Norman king using Byzantine mosaicists and Arab carpenters
  • A hilltop cathedral lined from floor to vault in gold, the whole Bible on two walls
  • A Capuchin crypt with eight thousand dressed and standing dead in it
  • A sandwich of boiled spleen, which is a genuine local delicacy and better than it sounds

Where to stay

Palermo, two nights

The capital of Sicily and, for about two hundred years, one of the richest cities in Europe. Under Arab rule from the ninth century it was a city of gardens and hundreds of mosques; the Normans took it in 1072 and, unusually for conquerors, kept the administration, the craftsmen and much of the population.

What that produced is the strange hybrid style you came for, and a city that has never been culturally simple since. Spanish baroque sits on Norman walls sits on Arab foundations, and none of it is separated out for you.

Day by day

Day 1 in Palermo

The crossroads, the cathedral and the first street food

The old town is quartered by two straight streets that cross at a baroque junction where each of the four corners is a curved facade of statues and fountains. Start there, then walk west to the cathedral.

The cathedral is a lesson in the whole city in one building. It was a basilica, then a mosque, then rebuilt as a cathedral in 1185, then given a neoclassical dome in the eighteenth century that nobody has ever defended. On one of the columns of the south porch there is still a verse of the Koran, carved when the building was a mosque and never removed. Inside are the porphyry tombs of the Norman kings and of Frederick II, who died in 1250 and is the reason most historians care about medieval Sicily.

In the evening, eat in the street. The markets wind down but the fryers stay open, and there is no better introduction to the city than a paper cone of something hot eaten leaning on a wall.

  1. 16:00

    Piazza Pretoria and the Fontana Pretoria

    Architecture

    A square filled edge to edge by a marble fountain of nude gods that Palermo bought secondhand from a Florentine palace in 1573. The convent overlooking it was scandalised and the city has called it the fountain of shame ever since.

  2. 17:00

    Palermo Cathedral

    Religious

    Honey-coloured, battlemented and Catalan in feeling rather than Italian. The nave is free; the royal tombs, the treasury and the roof walk are a small ticket, and the roof is worth it for the view over the old town.

  3. 19:30

    Street food and a beer

    Eat

    Panelle, crocche and an arancina, from a stall rather than a restaurant, eaten standing. Three or four euros and better than most dinners you will pay thirty for.

With more time: The opera house, ten minutes north, is the largest in Italy and does daytime tours as well as performances. Its steps are where the last scene of the third Godfather film was shot, which the guides will tell you before you have finished asking.

Day 2 in Palermo

The Norman palace, red domes, and the catacombs

Go early to the palace at the top of the old town, which has been the seat of government here since the Arab emirs and is now the Sicilian parliament, making it the oldest royal residence in Europe still in use. What you are there for is one room on the first floor.

Roger II finished it around 1140, and it is about the size of a large chapel and covered from floor to ceiling. Byzantine Greeks did the mosaics, with a Christ in the apse and Old Testament scenes down the nave in gold. Arab carpenters did the wooden honeycomb ceiling above them, painted with hunting scenes, dancers and drinkers. Nobody has ever built anything like it again.

The afternoon is the other Palermo. In a crypt on the western edge of the centre, eight thousand bodies are hanging on the walls and lying in cases, dressed in their own clothes, arranged by profession and by sex. It ran from the sixteenth century until the 1920s, and the last body admitted was a two-year-old girl who looks asleep.

  1. 09:15

    Palatine Chapel

    Religious

    Book a morning slot if you can, and give it an hour rather than fifteen minutes: the mosaics need time for your eyes to adjust, and the ceiling only makes sense once you have picked out the little painted figures.

  2. 11:30

    San Giovanni degli Eremiti

    Religious

    Five red domes on a bare stone box, in a garden of palms and cloister arches, a couple of minutes downhill from the palace. Twelfth century Christian architecture built by people who had been building mosques the year before.

  3. 12:45

    Lunch at a market

    Eat

    Ballaro is the closest to today's route and the least polished of the three big markets. Pasta with sardines, or grilled artichokes off a brazier, and a glass of something rough.

  4. 14:30

    Catacombe dei Cappuccini

    Culture

    Not for everybody, and the people who go remember it for life. Priests, professionals, women and children, in separate corridors, still wearing the clothes their families dressed them in. Photography is banned and the ban is enforced.

With more time: The archaeological museum, in a former convent north of the centre, has the carved temple friezes brought here from Selinunte on the south coast, which are the best Greek sculpture in Sicily and get almost no visitors.

Day 3 in Palermo

Monreale, and the last mosaics

The last morning goes uphill. A Norman king founded a cathedral in a village above Palermo in 1174, partly out of piety and mostly to spite the archbishop in the city below, and covered the inside with something over six thousand square metres of gold mosaic.

It is the largest surviving programme of Byzantine mosaic anywhere, the whole Bible from the creation down both walls, and an enormous Christ filling the apse with a face that follows you around the building. The cloister next door has two hundred and twenty-eight twin columns, no two carved capitals alike.

The bus takes half an hour each way, so a mid-afternoon flight is comfortable and an early one is not.

  1. 09:15

    Monreale Cathedral

    Religious

    Go at opening, before the coaches come up from the cruise ships. Pay the extra for the cloister and, if it is open, the roof terraces, which look down into the valley of orange groves the Arabs planted.

  2. 11:30

    Monreale

    Other

    The village around the cathedral, with a terrace at the far end looking back down the valley to Palermo and the sea. Ten minutes of walking and a coffee before the bus back.

  3. 13:00

    Cannoli, then the airport train

    Eat

    Filled while you watch, ricotta only, with candied peel at the ends. Then the train from the central station, which takes a little under an hour to the terminal.

With more time: If you would rather not leave the city, the botanical garden near the port is two hundred years old, enormous and mostly empty, with a ficus so large it has become a small forest on its own.

Before you go

Where to stay

The historic centre, in the quadrant between the cathedral and the two big markets, puts you in walking distance of everything and in the middle of the noise and the life. The streets around the opera house are smarter and quieter and still central.

Some blocks of the old town are genuinely run down and it changes street by street, so read reviews for the address rather than the district. Around the station is cheap and unappealing. Mondello, the beach suburb, is lovely and half an hour out, which is the wrong trade for two nights.

Getting around

Walk in the centre; almost everything below is within twenty minutes of the crossroads at the middle of the old town. Buses cover the rest and are slow, and traffic here does not obey much, so crossing a road is a matter of walking steadily and making eye contact.

For Monreale, take the bus from near the cathedral: half an hour uphill, running every twenty minutes or so. The airport is under an hour away by a train that runs from the central station.

Opening times, which matter here

The Palatine Chapel is inside a working parliament building, so access changes without much notice and the chapel closes to visitors during services and some sittings. Check the day before and go in the morning.

Almost everything else here shuts for several hours at lunchtime and the markets are finished by two. Plan the churches for the morning, the catacombs or a museum for the afternoon, and eat late.

Eating in the street

Palermo eats standing up. Panelle, chickpea fritters in a bread roll. Arancine, fried rice balls the size of an orange. Sfincione, a thick spongy pizza with onion and breadcrumbs, sold off the back of vans. Crocche, potato croquettes. And pani ca meusa, a soft roll filled with boiled and fried veal spleen and lung, with lemon or with ricotta, which is the city's signature and worth trying once with an open mind.

The markets are where to do this, in the morning. For sitting down, the old trattorie do pasta with sardines and wild fennel, aubergine caponata, and swordfish. Cannoli should be filled while you wait, never in advance.

Palermo does not present itself well and does not care. Half the good things here are behind a broken door, and the moment the city clicks is usually not in a monument at all: it is in a market at nine in the morning, with three people shouting the price of fish and somebody handing you a fritter.

Get up early, eat in the street, and go and look at that ceiling twice.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Palermo safe?
Yes, for a visitor, with the usual precautions turned up. Pickpocketing in the markets and around the station is the real risk. The city looks alarming to people used to northern Europe, because it is loud, decayed in patches and badly lit, and that is a different thing from dangerous. Avoid deserted lanes in the old town late at night and you will be fine.
Is three days enough?
It covers the Norman buildings, Monreale, the markets and one strange afternoon, which is the core. A fourth day would buy you Cefalu along the coast, or the temples at Segesta, or an afternoon at the beach. Palermo will absorb a week if you let it.
Which of the mosaics should I see if I only see one?
Monreale for the scale and the Palatine Chapel for the quality. If you can only do one, Monreale, because the sheer quantity of gold in one room is something you will not have experienced. If you like your art precise rather than overwhelming, the chapel.
Are the catacombs too much?
They are frank rather than gory: dressed bodies, in corridors, with labels. Some people find it moving and some find it unbearable, and children vary. If you know it is not for you, the archaeological museum is the alternative afternoon and no less worth it.
When should I come?
March to May, or October and November. Palermo in July and August is very hot and the city half empties in mid August. Winter is mild, wet in short bursts, and the quietest and cheapest time to see the mosaics without a crowd.