Cefalu
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Arab Norman Palermo And The Cathedral Churches Of Cefalu And Monreale, Inscribed 2015), A Norman Cathedral Of 1131 Beneath A Four Hundred Metre Rock · Cefalu, Sicily
A fishing town on the north Sicilian coast with a Norman cathedral at the front and a vertical rock four hundred metres high directly behind it, which is an arrangement no photograph quite prepares you for. The cathedral went up from 1131 and holds a Christ Pantocrator in the apse that predates the ones at Palermo and Monreale and is, for many people, the better of the three: older, more severe and set in less gold, so the face does the work. In front of it a sloping square and behind it a medieval grid of lanes running down to a small crescent of sand and a line of houses built straight onto the sea wall. The rock above holds a ruined castle and a megalithic building nobody can date, reached by a stiff forty-minute climb. It is an hour from Palermo by train, it is a working town rather than a resort, and it gets busy in August in a way it does not for the rest of the year. Go into the cathedral before ten, when the Palermo coaches have not yet arrived.
Piazza del Duomo, Cefalu, Sicily, 90015, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: the cathedral opens daily with a midday interval and shorter winter hours, closing to visitors during services, which are frequent. The cloister keeps its own shorter hours on a separate ticket. The Rocca path opens in daylight only, closes in high wind and after heavy rain, and has a last ascent well before dusk. The Mandralisca museum keeps ordinary museum hours. The beach, the sea wall and the lavatoio never close. Confirm the Rocca before climbing.