Sicily Day 2: Medieval Palermo
Today was a fascinating (and jam-packed) tour of Palermo's Arabo-Norman architecture, dating from the 1100s, which combines Byzantine Greek, North African Islamic and Norman French styles. In the process, we managed to see much of the Old Town part of the city, as well as take a brief detour to Palermo's ancient Phoenician past.
We started off this busy day with a generous breakfast buffet that featured all kinds of pastries (including flaky croissants delicately flavored with lemon and powdered sugar), flavorful local cheeses, the sesame-seed coated bread, ham, and other cold-cuts, as well as cereals, yogurt, eggs, and sausage. And jugs of really strong, espresso-like coffee (for which I was grateful) served alongside jugs of steamed milk, so that you could mix your own caffe latte.
Then it was off to brave the post-rush-hour traffic, which was a terrifying mix of small cars, scooters, and bicycles, all of them merrily mixing (and driving in whatever lanes they wanted). Our bus driver must have nerves of steel. Despite the traffic chaos, though, there aren't many honking horns, and no seems to get upset. At most, you'll hear someone muttering, "Hey, signore, please go ahead, okay?" in a sarcastic tone when a car or scooter tries to squeeze into a microscopic gap in the churning vehicular mass.
Our first stop was Zisa, a well-preserved 12th-century mansion/pleasure palace/hunting lodge, which was once located well outside the old city walls (Palermo has since swallowed it up), surrounded by Arabic style reflecting pools and gardens. The interior was an interesting mix of Norman castle and Byzantine and Arabic architecture, including one of the earliest uses of pointed arches (aka "Gothic style" which came from Islamic buildings via returning Crusaders) as well as exquisite Byzantine mosaics on the ground floor pavilion.
Sadly, I didn't get many photos of the interior--after about ten minutes, we acquired an escort of four or five museum staff, who followed us from room to room, keeping an eagle eye on any attempts to use our cameras. The pavilion with all of the gorgeous medieval mosaics and 17th-century frescoes was exempted from the no-photography rule, oddly enough.
Our next stop was a brief photo stop at "Castello della Cuba," another building of the same style, which had once sat in the middle of an artificial lake, but this building was mostly ruined (only the shell of the outer walls remained) and we weren't able to go inside.
Just down the street, conveniently-enough, was the Punic Cemetary, and ongoing archaeological investigation of Palermo's origins as a Phoenician trading settlement. (The Greeks later drove out the Phoenicians, and renamed the city "Panormos.") The graveyard is under a roof, with walkways constructed over the site so that you can peer down into the graves, with their exposed skeletons (frequently surrounded by clay pots containing burial offerings). A few graves, probably belonging to the city's wealthier citizens, contain stone coffins.
The highlight of the day was a visit to the Royal Palace, located on a small hill in the heart of the Old Town. Another example of the medieval Arabo-Norman style, with various additions in the following centuries, this huge building is four stories high, built around a large interior courtyard, surrounded by colonnades. The floors and staircases are made of various kinds of marble and a polished red limestone with embedded ammonite fossils.
The Royal Palace also contains the Palatine Chapel, its amazing (and amazingly-crowded) interior covered with gilded Byzantine mosaics depicting various saints, apostles, and scenes from the Bible. Amid the jostling crowd of tourists, each of us jockeying for position to take photos of the mosaic ceilings and arches. But the lower parts of the walls and the floor were amazing as well, inlaid with colored marble and semi-precious stones in elaborate geometric designs.
Lunch, served at a charming outdoor restaurant in a pedestrian zone of cobbled streets and medieval palazzi, was seafood again (it's fresh and plentiful in the port city). We started with white wine and a course of battered and fried vegetables and ham-and-cheese croquettes, followed by a pasta dish of minced swordfish in a tomato-and-mint sauce (and unexpected combination, but a tasty one), and finishing with a type of cheesecake, very sweet and creamy and studded with tiny chocolate chips.
After our leisurely meal, we took a short walk through a nearby park, a small botanical garden that featured a couple of huge banyan fig trees, each over a century old, as well as citrus trees, hibiscus, and other plants that thrive in Sicily's semi-tropical climate.
Then, it was off to the Cathedral, a huge wedding-cake confection in stone that combines Byzantine and baroque and Islamic architecture in a harmonious blend. The interior is surprisingly stark and neo-Classical, with plain white arches. We really only visited one of the side chapels, which contained the tombs of Sicily's Norman rulers (as well as one of the queens), before dashing out again to hit one last set of medieval churches before they closed for the day.
The cathedral courtyard featured a huge wheeled parade float in the shape of a gilded boat draped with garlands of red papier-mache roses, topped with a statue of St. Rosalia, the city's patron saint. The gilded boat is large enough to hold a small orchestra, which plays during a parade held during the St. Rosalia festival, when the float is pulled through the streets.
Our final stop for the day was a medieval church of St. Nicholas the Greek, which was built in the style of a North African mosque, but with Bible verses on the building's exterior instead of the usual suras from the Koran. The interior (where a wedding was in progress, so we had to tiptoe in and out) was covered in more of those gorgeous Byzantine gilded mosaics.
From there, our weary and footsore party trudged the few blocks back to the hotel, passing by the "Fountain of Shame," a huge 16th-century Renaissance extravaganza decorated with lots of nude marble sculptures imported from Florence. Apparently the citizenry of Palermo were *not* pleased with this use of public funds for this thing, and thus the nickname.
I'm spending a quiet evening in, sorting through my photos and catching up on travel journals.
Tomorrow, we're heading out of town to visit two more famous Norman churches at Monreale and Cefalu.