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.

British Museum's new Sicily show is a compelling celebration of mixing cultures

The less you know about Sicily, the more extraordinary you will find the British Museum's new exhibition.

The British, on the whole, know the Mediterranean's largest island as a holiday destination. Dependable sun, good food, child-friendly hosts and reasonable rental apartments an easy flight away. They'll have seen a handful of mafia films, and they may have noticed that some of the most dependable value-for-money wines on supermarket shelves come from here. After that, their awareness may get fuzzy. The idea of Sicily as a melting pot of diverse peoples that has twice dominated the whole Mediterranean with the dazzling genius of its culture may ... unless you opted for some serious sightseeing on that beach holiday ... come as a surprise.

The British Museum's new show Sicily: Culture and Conquest aims to change that. It focuses on two periods in which Sicily was, arguably, the most dynamic, exciting and intellectually advanced place in the Western world. First, you'll explore the late Greek period, when a culture far older and more sophisticated than Rome's became the jewel in that empire's crown. Then jump forward a thousand years to the dazzling Norman court, always in my top three for time travel destinations if I ever get the chance.

You're greeted not by artefacts, however, but by an enormous photo of a lush, green valley beneath warm blue skies and Etna's looming bulk. It's the kind of picture that draws you in, enticing you with beauty and reminding you of exactly why everyone was always conquering this place. First it was the Phoenicians, who also founded Carthage, then the Greeks. Their cultures merged here, evident in statues, altars and masks that aren't quite of one place or another. The altar held up by three alluring yet slightly alien maidens could be something dredged up from a mythical Atlantis. A stone slab with a dramatic, modern, spiralling design rewards study with shock when you realise it's obviously a man's organ penetrating a uterus topped by breasts.

Perhaps significantly, the female form is on top. This was the island where the goddess Persephone disappeared and her mother Demeter haunted the landscape searching for her. There's an evocative case of their devotional figures. Medusa contributes a slightly more threatening slice of femininity in a face that once served, gargoyle like, to decorate a temple's roofline. But she's more comic than threatening, picking up on a sense of fun that flows throughout the ages here. Further on, you'll see the first preserved use of paper in a European court, holding instructions written by the king's mother. Anyone familiar with Sicilian families will know that, however powerful the men seem to be, Mama calls the shots.

The show doesn't spend much time on the Arab era, using it as a transition between the ages rather than exploring it in any depth. Which is a shame, as I would have liked more. Instead, you can ponder an exquisite ivory casket, made by Arab craftsmen in Islamic style yet depicting Christian saints. Nearby is another enormous photo, this time of a sunny Palermo with the medieval Christian palace at the top and the towers of an ancient mosque (now a church) in the foreground. Both drive home the point that the melange of cultures here was a fruitful one for both the people, and the art.

The Normans took Sicily from the Arabs late in the 11th century. While they captured government, they let Islamic culture continue to flourish and bound it into their own ... leading to not only a model of productive tolerance, but one of the artistic triumphs of the Middle Ages. There's an exact replica of Roger II's magnificent coronation robe here (the original is too delicate to travel), on which Norman lions ... who look suspiciously like they've just come out of The Arabian Nights ... conquer placid camels while flowing Arabic script celebrates the regime.

The single most beautiful thing
in this section is a ceiling panel from Roger's palace, containing a whole forest of animals fleeing the hunt, framed by sinuous foliage inside precise Islamic geometry. Each animal is no more than a few inches high, and would have been completely invisible to people on the ground, yet the carving is a masterpiece. It shows the passion for beauty that permeated the island.

The most evocative piece, however, was a simple tombstone in four languages. Nothing else so powerfully evoked the multiculturalism the British Museum was celebrating here. I wonder, when they started putting the show together years ago, if they realised just how timely their message would be. In a world of growing xenophobia and factionalism, the brilliance of Sicily's melting pot is an uplifting message.

The Norman section has a challenge, however: the greatest glories of that age were architectural. The curators make noble attempts. There's a lovely mosaic of a madonna and child. They've made clever use of a light box to suspend a full-colour photo of the ceiling of the Palatine Chapel above you. But the photo lacks depth, thus you have no sense of the stalactites of ornamentation dripping towards you from heaven. And one small mosaic, no matter how fine, can convey the jaw-dropping awe that the golden jewel-boxes of the Palatine Chapel or the Cathedral at Monreale convey. (For more on the delights of seeing these things in person, read my take on Palermo here.)

This is probably the reason for my biggest disappointment with the show: it simply wasn't big enough. And that's inevitably because to really tell this story, you need to walk around inside it. See how the Christian church in Syracuse is built within the walls of the Greek temple. Marvel at the size of the complex at Agrigento. Wander around the crazy, compelling cultural mash-up that is the streets of Palermo. Maybe this show will inspire you to do that on your next holiday. Meanwhile, get to the British Museum for a taste.

PS. If you want to finish your day appropriately, then head off for dinner at Luce e Limoni, London's only properly Sicilian restaurant. Review here.