Palermo, Sicily: Street Food Capital With Arab, Norman, and Baroque Layers

The street food of Palermo is the most direct entry into the city and the most useful way to spend the first hour after the ship docks. The Ballarò market, the largest and oldest of the city's three main markets, runs every morning in the Albergheria quarter and sells produce, fish, meat, and prepared food from stalls that have occupied the same streets since the Arab period. Panelle (chickpea fritters pressed and fried in slabs) are the market's signature snack, served in a sesame roll; arancini (rice balls stuffed with ragù, cheese, or vegetables, fried to a crisp) are sold at most fritti counters. Pani ca meusa — a spleen sandwich with fresh ricotta and aged caciocavallo, served from carts near the Vucciria market — is the most confronting of Palermo's street foods and a reliable conversation piece regardless of whether it is eaten.

The Cappella Palatina inside the Norman Palace (Palazzo dei Normanni) is one of the most significant medieval interiors in Europe: a private royal chapel built for Roger II between 1130 and 1140 that combines Islamic muqarnas ceiling decorations, Byzantine mosaic programs covering every wall surface, and Norman structural forms in a single interior that demonstrates the cultural synthesis of Norman Sicily as no textbook can. The mosaics — gold-background biblical scenes executed by craftsmen from Byzantium — are in exceptional condition. The palace is also the seat of the Sicilian regional assembly; the chapel is open to visitors on a fixed schedule.

Monreale, 8 kilometres southwest of central Palermo in the hills above the city, has a twelfth-century cathedral whose interior mosaic program covers 6,340 square metres — the largest Byzantine mosaic cycle outside Hagia Sophia. The mosaics illustrate the Old and New Testaments in continuous narrative across the nave, apse, and transept walls, with a gold-background Christ Pantocrator dominating the apse. The attached Benedictine cloister is an Arab-Norman-influenced garden of 228 paired columns with carved capitals. The journey takes 30 minutes by taxi or bus, and the combination of the cathedral and cloister requires 90 minutes minimum.

The Duomo di Palermo, on Corso Vittorio Emanuele, has an exterior that is one of the most architecturally complex in Italy: successive campaigns of construction and alteration by Arab, Norman, Gothic, and Baroque builders over seven centuries produced a structure that defies easy categorization and rewards close examination of its different sections and periods. The interior was extensively remodeled in the eighteenth century and is less interesting than the exterior; the royal tombs in the left transept include the porphyry sarcophagus of Roger II and the tomb of Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor. The treasury museum includes the crown of Constance of Aragon, found in her tomb in 1491.