To see Palermo’s greatest treasures, go to church

Palermo is a terrible city for ABC Tourists.

The letters stand for “another bloody church”. Back when my mother worked in travel as a sideline to teaching art history, tour guides used the label to describe an impatient sightseer who, having seen one example of one type of thing, ticked it off his to do list and was bored to see any more. Anyone satisfied with a single church may want to give the Sicilian capital a wide berth. Not only do religious buildings dominate the city, but many of the greatest artistic and architectural treasures are within them. Indeed, if you really want to see the best of Palermo, you’ll be spending more time in front of altars than a priest during Holy Week.

Any first-time visitor should prioritise the Palatine Chapel within the Royal Palace and the Cathedral at Monreale. Both are jaw-dropping masterpieces that mash-up Byzantine Christian mosaics with Arabic architecture. I’d seen them (and written about them) before, however, and wanted to dig into the next tier of masterpieces.

The most memorable from my long list was the Chiesa del Gesù, more frequently called the Casa Professa by locals. In Dr. Who there’s an ongoing gag about newcomers being in shock when they realise how much bigger the hero’s ship is on the inside than out. There’s a similar sort of disconnect here, but the shock comes between the extremely plain exterior and the eye-wateringly opulent interiors. Anyone who’s visited a few Italian Jesuit churches knows that when you combine those priests with Baroque architecture you usually end up with something completely over the top. This may be the most outrageous I’ve seen yet.

The church’s interiors are encrusted with multi-coloured marbles. They aren’t just inlaid. Many project from the walls’ surfaces. Fruit cascades in abundance. Birds and animals stick body parts out, putti (baby angels) cavort everywhere. At higher levels, near life-sized plaster figures act out scenes from the bible. Or just swan about joyously. This isn’t a place for quiet contemplation or gloomy thoughts. This decorative scheme provokes a giddy, overwhelmed joy.

I found myself wandering about giggling with nervous laughter as one viewpoint became more outrageous than the next. This place makes St. Peter’s look like streamlined Scandì design. Let your eye rest on a single square meter … a border of three-dimensional fruit in semi-precious stone, the face of a loving angel, the lush explosion of a vase of flowers rendered in inlaid marble … and you’ll marvel at the craftsmanship. Taken all together, it’s almost too much. Despite the risk of overdose, don’t miss the particularly opulent scenes in the tight space behind the main altar, which would have been for the eyes of priests alone, or the treasures kept in the museum though the door there. Sumptuous altar cloths encrusted with tiny red coral beads are almost as three dimensional as the church outside. You’d need to layer on a lot of bling not to get upstaged by your surroundings while saying mass here. The sparkling array of religious accessories here shows how they attempted it. 

The extraordinarily lifelike plasterwork here is by the Serpotta family, a name that will dominate your experience of Baroque churches in Palermo. Giacomo is probably Sicily’s greatest sculptor. He appears to have never left the island, but rather asked travellers to bring back books and sketches of what was happening in Rome and beyond. He, with brother and son, then interpreted them for his local market. His versions are not just better than anything in Sicily, but on par with anything Bernini created in Rome or the virtuoso Asam family produced in Munich. 

To get the full impact of his talent you need to seek out his oratories, smaller private chapels where his plasterwork dominates the decorative scheme rather than just enhancing it. The most famous is the Oratorio di Santa Cita. Here’s another mismatch of inside and out. The small road to the chapel is dingy. The building’s exterior … like so much of Palermo … is covered in graffiti. To get to the chapel you climb a plain flight of steps with a quiet, peaceful courtyard garden to your right. Even the anti-room where you buy your ticket is fairly plain. Then you duck through a curtain and, bam!, you’re smacked upside the head with the sheer force of art.

The walls are crowded with impressive figures, from flocks of those trademark Serpotta putti to statuesque women embodying the mysteries of the rosary. Exquisitely rendered cascades of fruit, foliage and flowers surround them. It’s as heavily decorated as the Casa Professa, but it’s all white and flooded with light from big windows two thirds of the way up the walls, which makes it a more soothing place. 

Until you turn around and check out the back wall. It’s hard to feel soothed when confronted with a detailed recreation of the naval battle of Lepanto so lifelike you can practically hear the cannon fire and men screaming as they tumble overboard. Here, the putti swarm around piles of armour and weapons. It seems an unusual motif for a religious building unless you know that Lepanto was the point at which European powers definitively stopped Islamic expansion into Europe. It was also considered a specifically Catholic victory at a time when the wars of the Reformation were raging, so a nice bit of one-upsmanship against those irritating Protestants. Many consider this to be the Serpotta family’s masterpiece.

A short stroll down a nearby cross street brings you to the Oratory of San Domenico. (You can buy a combination ticket to see both, and they’re so close to each other it’s foolish not to.) Though the room is almost the same size as Santa Cita, and it also features life-sized plaster women representing various religious ideas around its walls, San Domenico has an entirely different feel. The plasterwork is broken up by moody paintings. There are more distinctive architectural features in the plaster like towering columns and great swags of drapery, and there’s a fair amount of gold gilding. It’s heavier, more serious and more masculine than Santa Cita, and feels more like something out of the English Baroque than the Palermitan. That may have something to do with the altarpiece, which isn’t an ornate tower of carved marble but a painting. A painting by Sir Anthony Van Dyck … someone so completely embedded in the story of English art it came as a real surprise to encounter him here.

There are three more Serpotta oratories in Palermo and I could have happily continued my “compare and contrast” exploration across them all, but I needed to plunge backwards in time.

Though the Palatine Chapel and the Cathedral in Monreale are the greatest examples of this city’s unique Arab-Norman culture, there are two more churches a stones’ throw from the famous Quattro Canti that are worthy runners up. 

San Cataldo is tiny, and all about the architecture. It looks more mosque than church, with its three distinctive red domes and Arabic arches, but it never served an Islamic function. It was build after the Normans took over from the Arabs, but inspired by their style. It did host a post office in the 18th century, by which time almost all of its interior decoration had been stripped out. Though it’s been restored, it hasn’t been re-decorated, so you can fully admire its magnificent bones. Go here first, for a better appreciation of what happens when you put flesh on that infrastructure.

Just next door is Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio. Its facade is a rather horrible hotch-potch of Arab-Norman, high gothic and Baroque, with none of the successive renovators making any attempt to integrate their work with the past. But, like so much in Palermo, it’s not the outside you’re here to look at. Inside, the Arab-Norman bones are intact and they retain most of their covering of magnificent mosaics. Angels and saints glimmer against an expanse of gold. The Virgin Mary dazzles in blue. Stars sparkle from a lapis night sky. Flowers and foliage twine across archways. Near the entrance, Roger II … the father of Sicily’s greatest age … has himself shown being crowned by Jesus. It’s an elegant bit of PR, considering that the pope was dragging his heels acknowledging Roger’s promotion from duke. When in doubt, go up the management chain.

The Admiral’s Church, as it’s known in English, didn’t manage to retain all of its original mosaics. About a third of the decoration, including the high altar, is Baroque. About the best you can say of it is that it isn’t intrusive. The colours and placement of figures work with what was there before so they fade into background. Though this isn’t a large church, plan on plenty of time here, moving from chair to chair to look up and appreciate the mosaic artistry.

A short stroll up the Via Vittorio Emanuele, one of the cross streets of the Quattro Canti, brings you to what you might think would be the most impressive church in town: the cathedral. It starts well. Unlike the Admiral’s bad exterior mash-up, the outside of this church is a wonderfully delicate blend of Arab-Norman features and later enhancements. That’s aided by an enormous piazza-cum-garden which sets off the architecture with swaying palm trees. Through the door, however, comes one of the few church interiors in Palermo that can actually be called boring. It’s big. It’s white. It has a bit of undistinguished statuary. There’s nothing memorable here and it looks like thousands of churches up and down the Italian peninsula.

Unless you turn left. A bit like heading that direction when boarding an airplane, all the important people are tucked away here. The cathedral houses the tombs of the Norman dynasty that made Sicily the artistic and intellectual showplace of Europe in the 12th and early 13th centuries. 

Here’s Roger II, the one you just saw being crowned by Jesus, and his grandson Frederick II. The younger man was known in his lifetime as stupor mundi, or wonder of the world, and was also Holy Roman Emperor. Here you’ll also find Frederick’s mother Constance, who did a remarkable job holding her father’s empire together … including abandoning the peaceful convent life she preferred to marry the German ruler, buried here beside her, and give birth to an heir when she was almost 40. Frederick’s wife, also a Constance, rounds out this fascinating group. Older than her superstar husband, Constance ruled Sicily for years while Frederick sorted out his more troublesome German inheritance. 

Given the lavishly decorated churches and palaces these people left behind, their tombs are almost austere. Massive dark marble sarcophagi sit beneath canopies held up by gracious columns. There’s a bit of mosaic work beneath the canopies and on the columns to add some colour but it’s mostly austere and august. Very ancient Roman, actually. That seems appropriate for people who thought they were establishing an Italian empire that would last generations. Sadly, it didn’t make it past Frederick’s children. But the tombs remain as a somber testament to the glories of Sicily’s greatest age.

There are 84 churches in Palermo before you dip into oratorios, private chapels and other religious architecture. It’s enough to overwhelm even the biggest architecture nerd, much less the ABC tourist. If you can get to these four examples, however, plus the Palatine Chapel and the Cathedral at Monreale, I promise you variety, beauty and wonder that will captivate anyone.

Sicilian Food Part Three: A mash-up of cooking school, palace peeping and literary greatness

My husband and I have been including cooking classes in our holidays since our second trip together. We both love food, and have always found cooking workshops a fantastic way to understand more about a place while honing our culinary skills. It seems we’ve been trend setters. What was once a relatively scarce option has moved on to the must-do list of modern travellers. Travel sites now overflow with options.

I’m not sure the expansion has been for the better.

The explosion in cooking experiences brings a host of instructors who may or may not have any real credentials, demonstrating a few recipes in spaces that may or may not be appropriately kitted out for a lesson. Many classes appear pitched to people who don’t cook much, and offer the same handful of dishes that everyone knows for the country in question. You’ll find the same pizza and tiramisu-making combo across Italy, for example, even though the first is a Neapolitan dish, the second from the northeast, and passionate locals would much rather have you eating their regional specialties. Despite the proliferation of options, I think it’s harder these days to find a really excellent experience than it was when cooking classes were relatively rare.

Extensive web research, however, can still reveal real jewels. This year it led me to the Duchess of Palma, Nicoletta Lanzi Tomasi, and her remarkable day of instruction, stories and good food in Palermo. 

This isn’t just a cooking class but an all-around experience. You start with a stroll through the market as the duchess explains the deep traditions of shopping here. Then it’s back to her family palazzo by the sea, a setting which immediately elevates this above your standard class. After a morning of cooking together you sit down to eat what you’ve produced in the palace’s dining room. The delights don’t end there. You’ll walk off some of that lunch touring the palazzo, once the home of Prince Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampadusa, author of what’s arguably the greatest of all Italian novels, The Leopard. Food, literature, elegant dining, art and architecture all in one day. I was in heaven.

The day starts in the courtyard of the palazzo on the edge of the Kalsa district. The impressive line of palaces of which this is one were built on old Spanish defensive walls facing the sea, stretching south from the famous Porta Felice. (Comprised of two baroque gatehouses, on either side of a road that forms the main spine of old Palermo and famously frame the setting sun, the Porta is amongst the most iconic symbols of Palermo.) You don’t linger long there, however, as you’ll be bundled into cars and whisked to Capo market. While Palermo’s other markets, Vucciria and Ballarò, have skewed more towards street food stalls and bars, Capo is still pretty much exclusively a functioning market for the locals with stall owners selling fruit, veg, fish, meat, and specialty ingredients. The duchess explained how there’s a sense of ownership between stall holders and their customers. In the Sicilian language you would say that you belong to each other. Vendors get to know you and your needs, and … once you become a regular customer … they would be mortally offended if you shopped anywhere else. You don’t handle the wares here; you tell the vendors what you want and they select for you. Meaning, of course, the regular customers will get the best.

Capo lies along a fairly dingy street overhung by 18th century buildings, their balconies festooned with laundry, football flags, plants and whatever doesn’t fit into the flats inside. Even on a sunny day, it feels like most of the light radiates from the beauties for sale, not from the sun above. Luscious shades of pink glowing atop bright white beds of ice in the fish stalls. Jars of honey catching and reflecting light like golden lanterns. Fruit and veg in every colour of the rainbow, all seeming far larger and more vibrant than what finally makes it to supermarket shelves in England.

Ingredients procured, we were bundled back into the cars waiting at the end of the street and returned to the palace. We went in a side door (the grand staircase was saved for our exit) and followed the Duchess through a warren of rooms. Some were small and functional, others more generously-proportioned sitting rooms. None particularly palatial in size but all furnished … elegantly but with a casual feel … with layers of art and antiques you only get from the accretion of many generations. There’s a passage in The Leopard where the young lovers go exploring in the family’s old palace and lose themselves in the bewildering labyrinth of rooms. I felt like I’d stepped not just into the author’s house, but into his novel.

We’d taken this route to get to the garden, a terrace about 50 feet wide and stretching the whole length of the palace, so densely planted with semi-tropical trees and vines it seemed impossible that we were in a big city. It also helps, of course, that the views from here are of the seafront and the mountains framing the northwest of Palermo’s bay. Traditional Sicilian tiles marked paths between the beds and water splashed into fountains occupied by rather majestic tortoises.

You could very happily curl up here with a good book for hours. But we were here to harvest herbs and edible flowers for lunch. The duchess established the format for the cooking session here, assigning different roles to individuals so the whole group was multi-tasking. It’s worth noting here that this is not a cooking class where each student does everything at his or her own workspace under the instruction of the leader. You may be in one room juicing oranges while someone else is peeling potatoes and another classmate is browning off onions. You’ll get recipes at the end, but if you’re looking for the kind of class that gets you “hands on” with every step of a recipe, this may make you a bit anxious.

The menu was seasonal (more aubergines, naturally) and of the region, though it turns out the duchess is originally from Venice. This made her stories even more interesting to me, as she reflected on the dramatic differences from her native region that she discovered when she first arrived here.

We started with polpette di melanzane, an aubergine-based take on meatballs perfect if you have an abundance of that purple vegetable … which seems to include everyone in Sicily in September … and an excellent vegetarian starter. You simply roast the whole aubergines until they go soft, scoop out the flesh, combine with herbs, seasoning, cheese, egg and breadcrumb. Then shape into balls, roll in bread crumbs and fry. I think this could also make an excellent side to simple preparations of meat or fish. The pasta course featured a sage and almond pesto; a useful reminder that you can play around with a lot more than basil here. Top tip: don’t add the oil until the very end, so you use only what the mixture needs get to the right consistency.

The main was stuffed calamari, something I’d done before but it was useful to get professional tips. Formal instruction showed me that I’d been over-stuffing my version. I also learned that salted capers, rinsed and dried, are much nicer than the usual ones in brine if you can find them, and that sanding your pan with bread crumbs before frying the calamari helps them not to stick. We wandered south from Sicily to the island of Pantelleria for the inspiration for the accompanying potato salad; a sharp, vinegary version with red onions and more of those gorgeous salted capers.

Desert was a “gelo” of melon. Gelo is simply fruit juice and sugar, heated and thickened with corn flour (corn starch if you're speaking American). It’s presumably what inspired the American brand Jell-o, as the texture is almost identical. Rather stupidly, it never occurred to me that my recipe for watermelon gelo could be used for any fruit, and made into an elegant sweet. Here, we poured the thickened mixture into coup-style glasses that had been dusted with powdered cinnamon and then dressed the tops with edible flowers before putting the glasses in the fridge to set. The order of cooking, of course, was not necessarily the same as of eating, depending on the times needed to prepare. Dessert, for example, was the first thing we tackled because of the setting time.

One of the joys of these experiences is sitting down your classmates to share the fruits of your efforts. I’ve never had more fun with the eating part of a cooking class, because I’ve never wrapped one up in such lavish interiors. We sat down at a table set for 12 under impressive Venetian glass chandeliers. Proper china, glassware and cutlery had been laid out and the duchess’ assistant had changed into an old-style black and white maid’s uniform to serve. French doors stood open on either side of the room, the exterior ones showing off the sea view while interior faced a courtyard draped with plants. The furniture was grand, 19th-century stuff at home in the architecture, with silver gleaming from the sideboard and big display cabinets showing off an impressive array of glassware marked with the family crest. Landscapes and family portraits looked down on us. I felt distinctly under-dressed.

After an unhurried lunch, the duchess rose from the table and invited us to tour the palace. (You take your things with you at this point, as the tour also leads you out.)

As you wander through the ballroom, the library, a sitting room and several more streamlined, museum-like rooms, the duchess explains the history of the building, its connection to the famous author and how her husband ended up as the heir. Tomasi di Lampedusa didn’t have children, but adopted the younger son of some equally aristocratic cousins to ensure he had someone to pass his legacy on to. The adopted Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi would go on to marry Nicoletta, your host for the day, and was a giant in the cultural world. He ran several orchestras and opera houses, led the Italian Cultural Institute in New York and wrote several books. Back in Palermo, he restored this palace … heavily damaged in WWII … and helped to promote his adopted father’s legacy.

Here, you can see the original manuscript of the book, first editions, notes and excerpts that weren’t used, and the library where he did most of his work. There’s a portrait of the author’s father, who was the model for the prince who is the main character in the book. If you’ve read The Leopard, everything in these rooms will remind you of some aspect of the story. If you haven’t read it, don’t even dream of setting foot in Sicily without doing so. It unlocks the soul of this island. It also turns Cooking with the Duchess into the most unique culinary workshop I’ve ever experienced.

I predict that a day cooking with the duchess in The Leopard’s lair will become a much hotter ticket next year after Netflix brings out its new adaptation of the novel. So if you’re interested in joining her, get in touch well in advance.

An additional note: The duchess also offers rental apartments within the sprawling palace for tourists. I loved our B&B for its proximity to the opera but I'd be very tempted to try this on my next visit to Palermo,