Islamic Heritage of Sicily and Arab-Norman Palermo

The Emirate of Sicily

Muslim forces from Aghlabid Ifriqiya, in what is now Tunisia, landed at Mazara del Vallo on Sicily's western coast in 827. The conquest was slow and contested rather than sudden: Palermo fell in 831 and became the island's capital, but Byzantine resistance in the east held out for decades, and the campaign is conventionally dated as complete with the fall of Taormina in 902. Sicily was then governed as a province and later, under the Kalbid dynasty, as a largely autonomous emirate.

Palermo under Muslim rule grew into a substantial city of markets, mosques, bathhouses and suburbs, and the geographer Ibn Hawqal, who visited in the later tenth century, left a famously opinionated description of it. Just as consequential was what happened outside the walls: irrigation, terracing and new crops reshaped Sicilian agriculture, and the citrus, sugar cane, mulberries and date palms of that era left a permanent mark on the island's landscape, cooking and language.

• 827: landing at Mazara del Vallo begins the conquest
• 831: Palermo falls and becomes the island's capital
• 902: the fall of Taormina completes the campaign

The Normans inherit an Arabic-speaking island

Norman forces under Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger took Palermo in 1072, and the conquest of the island was effectively completed by 1091. What followed is the unusual part. The Norman rulers kept much of the existing administration, minted coins with Arabic inscriptions, employed Muslim craftsmen and soldiers, and ran a chancery working in Arabic, Greek and Latin. Roger II, crowned king in 1130, presided over a court that was multilingual by design.

The clearest emblem of that court is the geographer al-Idrisi, who came to Palermo at Roger's invitation and spent years compiling a description of the known world, completed in 1154 and long known in Europe as the Book of Roger. Nine of the buildings from this period were inscribed together by UNESCO in 2015 as Arab-Norman Palermo and the Cathedral Churches of Cefalu and Monreale, a listing that is the most convenient checklist a visitor could ask for.

Palermo's Arab-Norman core

The single unmissable interior is the Cappella Palatina inside the Norman Palace, the royal chapel commissioned by Roger II in 1132. Its walls carry Byzantine-style gold mosaics, its floor is inlaid stone, and its nave is roofed by a painted wooden muqarnas ceiling made by craftsmen from the Maghreb, covered in banquet and hunting scenes and Arabic inscriptions. Very few buildings anywhere state the mixed character of a court so plainly in a single room.

Ten minutes away, on Piazza Bellini, two small churches sit side by side. Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio, universally called the Martorana, was founded in 1143 by George of Antioch, Roger II's admiral, and keeps a dense set of twelfth-century mosaics and an Arabic inscription of its own. Next to it, San Cataldo is a bare, beautiful cube topped by three red domes that look straight to North Africa. San Giovanni degli Eremiti, with its own cluster of red domes and a quiet cloister garden, completes the group, and Palermo Cathedral nearby carries visible reuse of an earlier building on the site.

• Cappella Palatina: mosaics under a painted muqarnas ceiling
• The Martorana and San Cataldo: two contrasting twelfth-century churches
• San Giovanni degli Eremiti: red domes and a cloister garden

Pleasure palaces and gardens

Outside the old walls the Norman kings built summer retreats in a landscaped park of orchards and water channels. The finest survivor is the Zisa, a tall stone block begun in the 1160s under William I and finished under William II; its name comes from the Arabic al-Aziza, the splendid. Inside, a vaulted fountain hall with a shallow water channel running out across the floor is a piece of Islamic palace architecture transplanted whole, and the building now holds a small museum of Islamic-period objects.

A short distance away stands the Cuba, another royal pavilion of the same park, now stranded in a military compound and stripped of its setting but still legible in its proportions and its band of Arabic inscription. Together they explain something the churches do not: how the court actually lived, and how central shade, running water and garden views were to that idea of comfort.

Monreale, Cefalu and the wider island

Monreale, in the hills above Palermo, is the day trip worth making. William II founded the cathedral and its Benedictine monastery in 1174, and its interior is sheathed in acres of mosaic; the adjoining cloister, with its paired columns and carved capitals, has interlaced pointed arches whose ancestry is unmistakably Islamic. Cefalu, an hour east along the coast by train, holds the third of the great cathedral churches, begun under Roger II, with a severe twin-towered facade above an old fishing town.

In the west of the island, Mazara del Vallo still has a knot of narrow lanes known as the Kasbah, where a large Tunisian fishing community has lived for generations, and the town museum displays the Dancing Satyr, a bronze recovered from the sea nearby. It is worth being honest about one absence: no mosque from the emirate survives as a standing building. Islamic Sicily is read instead through later architecture, place names, agriculture, craft and archaeology.

Practical notes for visiting

Palermo makes an easy base, and three to four days covers the Arab-Norman circuit comfortably, with Monreale and Cefalu as half-day and day trips respectively. Most of the city sites are within walking distance of one another in the old centre, though the streets are hard-surfaced and often busy, so decent shoes matter more than a transport pass. Spring and autumn are the best seasons; high summer on the Sicilian coast is hot and crowded.

Opening hours are the main planning constraint. The Cappella Palatina keeps restricted hours when the regional assembly is sitting in the palace above it, several churches close over a long lunch, and Monreale's cloister and cathedral are ticketed separately from each other. Booking the palace online ahead of time is sensible in season, and mosaics reward a bright morning, so leave the markets and street food for the afternoon.

Frequently asked questions