Palermo

Top things to do in Palermo

1. 01

   Palazzo dei Normanni and the Cappella Palatina - Norman kings under an Islamic ceiling

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   The royal palace stands on Punic foundations, served as an emir's fortress, became the seat of Roger II's court and now houses the Sicilian regional assembly, which is why parts of it close at short notice. The chapel built inside it in the 1130s is the clearest single statement of what Norman Sicily was: Byzantine mosaics on gold ground, a Fatimid muqarnas ceiling of painted wood above them showing hunters, dancers and drinkers, Latin, Greek and Arabic inscriptions in one room, and a floor of cut porphyry and marble. Upstairs the Sala di Ruggero is mosaicked with leopards, archers and peacocks rather than saints.

2. 02

   Cattedrale di Palermo - the cathedral that was a mosque

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   Begun in 1185 by Walter of the Mill, the English archbishop who effectively ran the kingdom, on ground that held a basilica and then the city's main mosque; a column of the south porch still carries a verse from the Qur'an cut into the stone. What stands now is six centuries arguing with itself - Norman apses, a Catalan Gothic porch, a neoclassical dome dropped on in the 1780s that nobody defends - with the porphyry tombs of Roger II and Frederick II inside, an astronomers' meridian line inlaid across the floor in 1801, and a roof walk over the rooftops.

3. 03

   Teatro Massimo - the largest opera house in Italy

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   Giovan Battista Basile's neoclassical pile took twenty-two years to build and opened in 1897, the biggest opera house in the country and among the largest in Europe, its auditorium ringed with boxes under a ceiling of painted petals that open for ventilation. It then sat closed for twenty-three years from 1974 in a fog of restoration contracts and civic dysfunction before reopening in 1997, and its outdoor steps are where the closing scene of The Godfather Part III was shot. Day tours run when the stage is free, though a seat at a performance is the better way in.

4. 04

   Pane ca meusa, panelle and sfincione - eat standing up

   food ⭐ Highly recommended

   Palermo's street food is a cuisine rather than a snack. Panelle, fritters of chickpea flour, go into a sesame roll with potato croquettes; sfincione is a soft oily focaccia with onion, anchovy and breadcrumb; arancine are feminine here, and the eastern half of the island will argue with you about it. At night, stigghiola of skewered offal smokes on street corners, and pane ca meusa is a roll packed with veal spleen and lung simmered in lard, taken plain or married with ricotta and caciocavallo. Finish with a cannolo filled at the counter so the shell is still crisp, or cassata under green marzipan.

5. 05

   Monreale - the greatest mosaic cycle in the Mediterranean

   history culture arts ⭐ Highly recommended

   Ten kilometres up the hillside above the city, William II's cathedral of the 1170s is lined floor to ceiling with something like six thousand square metres of gold-ground mosaic: the Old and New Testaments told as a strip around the nave, and a Christ Pantocrator filling the apse whose two hands span most of the wall. The cloister beside it is 228 paired columns, every capital carved differently, around an Arab fountain. It is a city bus ride from the centre and it is the finest thing in western Sicily.

6. 06

   La Martorana and San Cataldo - two Norman churches on one square

   history culture arts

   Both sit up a few steps off Via Maqueda on Piazza Bellini. The Martorana was founded in 1143 by George of Antioch, Roger II's Greek-speaking admiral, and keeps twelfth-century Byzantine mosaics including a portrait of Roger crowned directly by Christ rather than by any pope, which is political argument in gold; it later grew a baroque western end and still serves an Italo-Albanian congregation in the Greek rite. San Cataldo next door is the opposite - bare honey-coloured stone, three red domes, a marble floor and almost nothing else.

7. 07

   Ballarò, Capo and Vucciria - the street markets

   food culture arts shopping

   Three markets survive from the many that once fed the city, and each has its own character. Ballarò, in the Albergheria, is the biggest and the most working: produce, fish on ice, whole swordfish, fritters going into oil, and West African and South Asian stalls trading alongside Sicilian ones. Capo, behind the opera house, is tighter and roofed over with awnings. Vucciria, once the most famous of the three and the subject of Guttuso's best-known painting, has shrunk to almost nothing by day and becomes an open-air drinking and grilling session at night. Go to at least one in the morning, when the shouting is real.

8. 08

   Catacombe dei Cappuccini - eight thousand dressed corpses

   history off beaten path

   Under a Capuchin monastery west of the centre, corridors are hung with the mummified dead of Palermo, held upright in the clothes they chose to be seen in for eternity: friars in habit, professionals in frock coats, women in lace, children in their best. The practice ran from the late sixteenth century into the 1920s and the corridors are sorted by trade and by sex. The last body admitted is the reason many people come - Rosalia Lombardo, embalmed at two years old in 1920 so successfully that she appears to be asleep behind glass. Not for everyone, and treated here as family history rather than a novelty.

9. 09

   Quattro Canti and Fontana Pretoria - the baroque crossroads

   history culture arts

   The Spanish viceroys drove two straight streets through the medieval city and set a baroque octagon where they cross: four identical concave facades stacked with fountains, the seasons, Spanish kings and the four patron saints the city kept before Rosalia replaced them all. A minute away, Fontana Pretoria is a Florentine garden fountain bought secondhand in the 1570s and reassembled here, a tiered crowd of naked river gods and nymphs facing a convent and a church, which is how it came to be known as the fountain of shame.

10. 10

    Palazzo Abatellis - the Triumph of Death and Antonello's Annunciata

    culture arts history

    The regional gallery, in a fifteenth-century Catalan Gothic palace in the Kalsa, holds two works worth the visit on their own: an enormous anonymous Triumph of Death of the 1440s, a skeletal horse trampling the rich as it looses arrows, lifted from a hospital courtyard wall; and Antonello da Messina's Annunciata, a young woman looking up from her book with one hand raised, the quietest famous face in Sicily. Carlo Scarpa's 1950s installation design - how the works are hung, lit and set against bare stone - is studied by architects in its own right.

11. 11

    San Giovanni degli Eremiti and La Zisa - the Arab-Norman outliers

    history culture arts

    Two buildings that show plainly what the Norman kings borrowed. San Giovanni degli Eremiti, behind the royal palace, is a bare stone church with five red domes over a small cloister planted with citrus and jasmine, built by masons working in an Islamic idiom for a Christian king. La Zisa, further west, was a summer pleasure palace whose name comes from al-aziz, the splendid, with a fountain hall where water ran down a carved marble chute to cool the room; it now holds a collection of Islamic art from Sicily and around the Mediterranean.

12. 12

    Giacomo Serpotta's oratories - theatre staged in white stucco

    culture arts history off beaten path

    Palermo's strangest art hides in small confraternity chapels. Between the 1680s and the 1720s Serpotta covered their walls in white stucco: allegorical women lounging on cornices in contemporary dress, putti clambering over every ledge, whole scenes modelled in relief as though a curtain had just gone up. The oratories of Santa Cita, San Lorenzo and the Rosario in San Domenico hold the best of it. San Lorenzo also lost its Caravaggio nativity to thieves in 1969 and the altar now carries a reconstruction.

13. 13

    Monte Pellegrino and the Santuario di Santa Rosalia - the mountain over the city

    nature wildlife scenic history

    The limestone headland closing the bay to the north, which Goethe called the most beautiful promontory in the world, and which locals climb on an old stepped mule path from the edge of the city. Near the top a church front is built across the mouth of a cave where a hermit's bones were found in 1624 and carried through a plague-stricken Palermo, after which the plague broke; Rosalia has been the patron ever since and her midsummer festival is the biggest event of the local year. The view runs from the Conca d'Oro out to sea on both sides.

14. 14

    Mondello - the belle epoque beach at the end of the bus line

    scenic

    A crescent of white sand between two headlands half an hour from the centre, developed around 1900 once the marshes behind it were drained, with a Liberty-style bathing pavilion standing out over the water on stilts. In summer this is where Palermo goes: umbrellas in ranks, gelato eaten inside a brioche, a long evening passeggiata along the front. Out of season it empties out and the water turns clear and cold.

15. 15

    Opera dei Pupi - the Sicilian puppet theatre

    culture arts

    Armoured marionettes close to a metre tall, worked from above on steel rods, hammering through episodes of the Charlemagne cycle - Orlando, Rinaldo and the paladins against the Saracens - in dialect, to a hand-cranked barrel organ and a great deal of decapitation. It was serial working-class entertainment in the nineteenth century, one story strung across weeks of nights, and it now sits on the UNESCO intangible heritage list. A few family companies still perform, and the puppet museum in the Kalsa keeps their figures alongside marionettes from Vietnam, Japan and West Africa.

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