After our wonderful first day, we had a slow start to our second in Palermo. We found out that breakfast at the Palazzo Brunaccini is in a lovely courtyard.
After we finished, John snapped a few more pictures of this elegant — yet surprisingly affordable — hotel.
Our destination for the day was the old Norman stronghold of Monreale, about 10 kilometers southwest of Palermo. Even though it seems close, we had read that it was difficult to get Monreale because of Palermo traffic, so we decided to ask our hotel about the best way to get there. They told us to take a bus because a cab would be quite expensive. As it turned out, the municipal bus was cheap, but it took over almost an hour and a half for the correct one to arrive and another forty five minutes to make it to Monreale. This morning was not one of the high points of the trip so far.
Maybe it would help to have a little history of Sicily here. The earliest settlement of the island had been by the Greeks several centuries before Christ. The Romans conquered it and incorporated it into their empire, though it remained largely a Greek-speaking area. After the military and political decline of the western Roman empire in the fifth century, Justinian incorporated the island into the Byzantine empire. However, the military might of the Arabs proved stronger than that of the Greeks, and from about 700 to about 1000 Sicily was governed by Muslim emirs. Much of the population apparently converted to Islam, and there was significant migration from north Africa and other Muslim areas. In the eleventh century, the Catholic rulers of the southern Italian kingdoms, worried about further Arab expansion, hired Normans mercenaries to attack and conquer Sicily. In 1060, six years before the Normans would invade and conquer Britain, the Norman forces captured Palermo and much of the north part of the island and established what they called the “County of Sicily.” Roger II, the man who built the Palatine chapel, became Sicily’s first Christian monarch. However, it would take several decades before Arab forces were completely routed from the island. William II, Roger’s son, decided to move the capital from Palermo to a more easily defensible position and picked the nearby village of Aghia Kiriaki which he renamed Monreale. I could see as soon as we arrived why they thought this was a better place defensively.
Church and state hardly being separate at that time, William also decided that this should be the ecclesiastical center of Sicily as well. So William set about to build a cathedral here and to make it one of the most splendid in the world. Although the structure is a stout, squat Norman church on the outside, William hired Arab and Byzantine artists to adorn the interior. Monreale is celebrated for its mosaics.
Probably the most charming part of this mosaic work are sequence of mosaics by the clerestory windows that illustrate the story of Noah. Here Noah and his sons bringing the animals into the ark. The pictures are charming. But there is important symbolism here as well. The ark was understood in patristic exegesis to prefigure the Church itself. As you look into the boat you can see Norman men and women there. No doubt this is how William and his court saw Sicily. It was a Christian “boat" in a hostile Muslim “sea."
Unfortunately, our arduous bus ride and had dropped us off at the cathedral only 25 minutes before it closed for lunch, so we did not have as much time as we would have liked to immerse ourselves in the artistic wonder of this place. The cloisters of the adjacent monastery, not part of the cathedral itself now but a state archeological site, were still open so we looked around there.
As time sometimes matters more than money, we paid of taxi 25€ to take us back to our hotel. We were just not up for another three hours with the bus.
Sort of exhausted, we napped for most of the afternoon. In the evening we went to explore the Kalsa quarter of Palermo. During the emirate, this had been the administrative and commercial center of Arab Palermo. Until recently it had been the most rundown and dangerous neighborhood in the city. But it recently has begun to undergo a significant revival, and it is now sort of the Echo Park of Palermo. There was some effort to create a waterfront park here, but they seemed to have tried to do it on the cheap and it has a certain “urban renewal” feel to it.
The entertainment scene is what really is developing Kalsa. There are many good restaurants here and our hotel recommended La Cambusa. I had an amazing dish of rabbit stuffed with pistachios. I am normally adverse to what is sometimes called “food porn,” but this one merits a picture.
As we walked back to the Brunaccini we could see the just how lively this area can be now — and it was still pretty early in the evening for Sicily!
