Monreale
UNESCO World Heritage Site (Arab Norman Palermo And The Cathedral Churches Of Cefalu And Monreale, Inscribed 2015), A Norman Cathedral Of The 1170s With About 6,000 Square Metres Of Mosaic · Monreale, Sicily
Eight kilometres up the hill behind Palermo is a cathedral whose interior is covered, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, in something like six thousand square metres of gold mosaic: the whole Old and New Testament running round the nave in registers, with a Christ Pantocrator filling the apse whose face is about two metres across and who is looking directly at you from the moment you walk in. It was built in about a decade in the 1170s by a Norman king who wanted his own archbishopric to outrank Palermo's, and the haste is why it is coherent: one campaign, one programme, no later committee. Beside it is a cloister of two hundred and twenty-eight twin columns, no two capitals carved alike, which is a separate ticket and a separate queue and is skipped by people who do not know it is there. Go up on the bus from Palermo, go early, and take coins for the lights, because a good part of the cycle stays in the dark until somebody feeds the boxes.
Piazza Guglielmo II 1, Monreale, Sicily, 90046, Italy
NO OPENING TIME HERE WAS CHECKED. The structure: the cathedral opens daily with a MIDDAY INTERVAL, shorter winter hours and closure to visitors during services. THE CLOISTER IS A SEPARATE STATE MUSEUM with its own hours, its own desk and a weekly closing day, and the state free first Sunday applies to it but not to the church. The roof terrace is ticketed again and closes in bad weather. Buses from Palermo run frequently through the day. Confirm all three before going up.