Wednesday, September 13, 2023; Palermo and Monreale
We started the day by climbing into an Uber and heading up the mountain to the town of Monreale, home to one of the most unusual cathedrals in the world. It was built by William II beginning in 1174 as a counterweight to the growing secular power of the Archbishop of Palermo, William Offamilio; by attaching a monastery of French Benedictines to the Cathedral, he was able to install a competing Archbishop high on Mount Caputo, overlooking Palermo and the sea.
Just as in the Palatine Chapel built by Roger II, Monreale’s interior is lit by golden mosaics on virtually every surface. This imposing basilica, at 335 feet long by 130 feet wide, is slathered with over 68,000 square feet of golden mosaics—a third more than at St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. While this is a fine example of the interplay between architecture and visual art, it’s also the perfect illustration of something uniquely Sicilian: the fusion between classical, Byzantine, Arab, and Norman craftsmanship. Although each glass tile contains a layer of gold thinner than a sheet of paper, it’s estimated that the walls of this cathedral hold about two tons of gold.
The king justified the enormous expenditure of this project by telling of a dream he had while sleeping under a carob tree during a hunting expedition. The Madonna appeared to him and told him to dig under the tree and use the treasure he would find there to build her a great church. The mosaics were made with pure gold. Hundreds of the finest craftsmen from Constantinople were employed at great expense to expedite the work. The monolithic granite columns that separate the nave from the aisles are from a temple or temples of the Roman era.
The magnificent series of mosaics in the nave tell in pictures the stories of the Old and New Testaments. It is not known whether only Greek, or local craftsmen trained by Byzantine artists, were involved in this remarkable project, and the exact date of its completion is uncertain (though it is thought to have been around 1182).
The apse is dominated by the mighty half-length figure of Christ Pantocrator, with a solemn and, dare I say it, rather anxious expression.
Despite the obvious similarities, there are profound differences in the experience of the Palatine Chapel and the Cathedral of Monreale. The chapel’s very intimacy ensures that the visitor is enveloped in the golden aura; the cathedral’s grandeur makes for a more distanced, more awe-inspiring viewing.
Next was Monreale’s remarkable Benedictine cloister, with Arab-Norman arches borne by 228 twin columns.
All the columns have carved Romanesque capitals, of which very few are alike. Many of the columns are also decorated with mosaics or reliefs. They are the work of five master craftsmen, each of whom made some of the capitals, assisted by several apprentices, but only one capital is signed. A prolific confusion prevails of birds, animals, monsters, plants and people, representing a variety of scenes, both mythological and religious, with Christian symbolism and even the sacrifice of a bull to Mithras.
The slender marble columns in the cloisters are also Roman in origin, believed by some scholars to have been brought here by the Benedictine monks from the sunken city of Baia, near Naples. There they may once have formed the portico of a villa: some, especially on the east side, show traces of having spent years under the sea, the marble bored in places by a type of mussel, the sea-date (Lithophaga mytiloides).
The monks grew fruit trees in the enclosure (or hortus conclusus): trees symbolising Paradise—date-palms, olives, figs and pomegranates. In the southwest corner, a column carved like a stylised palm tree in a little enclosure of its own forms a charming fountain, used by the monks to wash their hands before entering the refectory.
What a morning! Monreale leaves an impression matched for us only by the great Gothic cathedrals of the Isle de France and perhaps San Francesco in Assisi.
We called an Uber and had a coffee at a cafe alongside the town’s main square. When the Uber finally “arrived,” the driver claimed she could not get all the way up the hill to us (although many cars were pouring out of the uphill street) and that we should meet her at the cathedral parking garage. That turned out to be a hot kilometer downhill. When we got there, she said she was somewhere else another half kilometer away. When we got there she said she had “waited” for 30 minutes and had left! So we did what we should have done originally, jump in a cab; the driver was terrific, knew all the backstreets, and had us in the center of Palermo in a jiffy.
The day before we had stuck our nose into a bakery inside Santa Catarine, I Segreti del Chiostro (the secrets of the cloister) and were only deterred from indulging by the big lunch and gelato that lay only 20 minutes behind us. Today imposed no such barriers, and we each had an incredibly fresh and delicious cannoli filled with ricotta and decorated with pistachios and candied orange peel. Enjoying these things while sitting in the cloister is a genuine and very unusual pleasure.
David was eager to experience the famous Balloró market, with its shouting fish and fruit hawkers; the route led us by the Gesu, the first Jesuit church in Sicily, into which we popped very quickly.
Once in the market, we found only food stands and souvenir shops; the real action clearly occurs in the morning, when the locals do their shopping. We did solve a mystery, though. We had been intrigued by the multicolored dome of a church that one can see all over central Palermo.
It turned out to be the church of the Carmelites.
At this juncture, even I was ready to forgo a church or two and return home for a shower and a siesta. In the late afternoon we headed down to the port hoping to find a seaside bar. We walked down the Corso to an inlet in the harbor that serves as a marina and found…traffic roaring between us and the water. We retreated up the corso and found a very nice outdoor bar for our afternoon drink.
It turned out to be a long walk to our restaurant for the night, Corona Trattoria, which was on the other side of the city center. As we walked from our end of town things became more modern and moneyed. We got a glimpse of the massive Teatro Massimo, the second largest opera house in Europe.
The food had gotten better every night, and this was the best of our meals in Palermo. Corona is a modern, minimalist place enlivened by an amazingly friendly staff and what was obvious a large contingent of regulars. The patrón took our order and chatted with us, half in Italian half in English. We started with their version of street food: sardine polpetti, squid arancini, and baccalá frito; really superb. They had triglie (red mullet) on the menu, and I was directed to the boss’s wife, a fellow Montalbano fan, to ask how Salvo liked his mullet prepared. The answer was fried, and that’s what Patti and I had: two rather small but delicious and delicate fish with white flesh. Sue had bucatini con sarde, and David linguine with mussels. We had yet another Etna Bianco, this one from a producer I didn’t know and can’t remember. Good, though.