If you have read anything about Frederick II, you have met Jesi, where he was born in a tent in the town square, and Castel del Monte, the building he is identified with. The place where that story ends, though, is a side chapel of Palermo cathedral, and you walk past it in twenty seconds if nobody tells you.
Inside are six imperial sarcophagi, four of them in red porphyry, and the list of who they hold is the history of the twelfth-century Mediterranean written in stone: the first king of Sicily, his daughter, her emperor husband and their son, the stupor mundi.
This is a guide to what you see on entering. The church is free; the tombs, the crypt and the treasury are in the Monumental Area, which has a ticket of its own, and the details are at the end.
1185, and a cathedral built out of spite
Why does a city that already had a cathedral build another enormous one in a few years? The current answer is that it was a race, and the man who started it lost.
Archbishop Walter Offamilio, English by origin and immensely powerful at the Norman court, had the cathedral rebuilt between 1184 and 1185. In the same years King William II, who was in conflict with the archbishop, was putting up the cathedral of Monreale eight kilometres away, and had made it an autonomous archiepiscopal see precisely in order to strip Offamilio of power.
The result is that Norman Sicily ended up with two gigantic cathedrals in sight of one another, built in the same years by two men who could not stand each other. Monreale won on mosaics; Palermo remained the city’s cathedral.
The column with the Quranic verse
Before you go in, stop under the porch on the south side and look at the first column on the left. It carries an inscription cut in Arabic characters, and it is a verse from the Quran.
It is not an orientalist ornament nor a joke: that column comes from the mosque that occupied this very spot. Palermo was Arab from 831 to 1072, and the Byzantine basilica that stood here had been turned into the congregational mosque. When the Normans took the city back, the mosque became a church again and its columns were reassembled in the new porch.
It is the material clue that convinced generations of scholars of the basilica-mosque-cathedral sequence, and it stands there at eye level, in front of a stream of tourists photographing the facade.
The exterior, that is, a building that has changed its mind four times
Look at the whole from a distance, because that is how this church reads best: four periods set side by side without mediation.
The apses, on the east side, are the original Norman ones, with interlacing blind arcading and the inlays of lava stone that are the signature of Arab-Norman architecture. The towers at the corners, crenellated, are medieval with fourteenth-century remakes. The porch on the south flank, with three pointed arches and the densest decoration, is Catalan Gothic of the fifteenth century, and it is the finest part of the building.
And then there is the dome, in the middle of all this, added between 1781 and 1801 by Ferdinando Fuga. It is neoclassical, it has nothing to do with the rest, and it is visible from any angle. It is not a flaw to be hidden: it is proof that this cathedral never stopped being a building site.
Inside, the disappointment to allow for
It should be said first, because it is the commonest reaction: the interior does not resemble the exterior, and anyone who goes in expecting mosaics comes away empty.
What you see is a neoclassical nave, white and grey, with plain columns and sober stucco. It is the result of Ferdinando Fuga’s remodelling between 1781 and 1801, which dismantled the medieval interior and built another one inside the same walls.
The operation has been judged harshly for two centuries, and partly with reason: the Norman scheme and much of the furnishing were lost. But knowing it in advance changes the nature of the visit. You do not go in for the architecture: you go in for what the architecture contains.
The royal tombs: who is there, and in what order to look
Why four cases of red porphyry, and not marble? In the first two chapels of the right aisle stand six sarcophagi, and the four principal ones are of red porphyry, the stone that in the Roman empire was reserved for emperors and whose only quarry, in Egypt, had been exhausted for centuries. Using it in the twelfth century meant one thing only: declaring yourself heir to Rome.
Under the first canopy, on the left, is Roger II, died 1154, first king of Sicily. He had had the sarcophagus prepared for Cefalù, where he wanted to be buried; it ended up in Palermo, and the fact was argued over for centuries.
Beside him is Frederick II, died 1250. The case is porphyry, held up by lions, and he is not alone inside: examinations have found three bodies, his own, that of Peter II of Aragon and a third never identified with certainty.
In the second group are Henry VI, emperor and Frederick’s father, and Constance de Hauteville, his mother, daughter of Roger II. Through her the Norman kingdom of Sicily passed to the Hohenstaufen, and that is why a Swabian emperor is buried in Sicily.
The sarcophagus of Constance of Aragon, which is Roman and shows it
Among the six there is one that does not fit, and it is worth seeking out on purpose: the case of Constance of Aragon, Frederick II’s first wife, who died at Catania in 1222.
It is not porphyry and it is a Roman sarcophagus of the second century, reused. Across the front runs a lion hunt in high relief, with horsemen and animals, which has nothing to do with a Christian queen of the thirteenth century. Above it, added at the moment of reuse, is the inscription: OBIIT CATANIE MCCXXII.
Reusing an ancient sarcophagus was not a cheap shortcut: it was the most direct way of saying that your dynasty continued the Roman one. In the same chapel, the porphyry says the same thing with a different material.
Inside her tomb was found the crown she had been buried in, now in the cathedral treasury together with her ring and her robe.
The meridian line by Piazzi, which is from 1801 and still works
What are the twelve signs of the zodiac doing on the floor of a cathedral? Along the floor of the nave runs a brass strip with inlays of coloured marble that draws each of them in turn. Almost everyone steps over it.
It is a camera obscura meridian line installed here in 1801, and it is signed by Giuseppe Piazzi, the astronomer who ran the Palermo observatory and who in January of that very year had discovered Ceres, the first known asteroid.
The mechanism is the same as the Cassini meridian line in San Petronio in Bologna, a century and a half older: a hole high up, a ray of sun falling on the line at noon, and the position of the disc of light telling you the day of the year. It served to set the city’s clocks and to fix the date of Easter.
Go towards midday and you can see the ray.
The roofs are closed, and it is worth knowing
Warning: the walk along the roofs, one of the two reasons people buy a Monumental Area ticket, currently cannot be done. Maintenance and restoration work has begun on part of the covering, and online sale of the roof ticket is suspended.
Tickets for the other areas remain available online and at the desk: royal tombs, crypt, treasury and apses. If the view from above was your main reason, know it in advance: the panorama over the city is to be had elsewhere, for instance from the dome of San Giovanni degli Eremiti or the terrace of Palazzo Branciforte.
The crypt and the treasury, which almost nobody plans for
The crypt is the oldest surviving part and in its present form is Norman. Since 1728 it has held twenty-three sarcophagi, and many, like Constance’s, are Greek and Roman works adapted over the centuries: it is a room where the reuse of antiquity can be touched with your hands.
The treasury holds the crown of Constance of Aragon together with the other objects found in her tomb, and a collection of silver and vestments. It is not a huge collection, but the crown alone is worth the stop: it is one of the very few pieces of Swabian imperial goldsmithing to have reached us.
If you are building an itinerary, the cathedral is the second stop in What to see in Palermo in 2 days, and it is ten minutes on foot from the Palatine Chapel.
Practical information
Checked on 3 September 2026 on the cathedral’s official site. Prices and hours change: check again before you travel, and in particular check whether the roofs have reopened.
Tickets. Entry to the church is free, as in any cathedral. The Monumental Area is paid: it takes in the royal tombs, the crypt, the treasury, the apses and, once they reopen, the roofs. There is a ticket for the royal tombs with the chapel of the Beneficiali alone, and a combined one that adds the Archbishop’s Palace and the Diocesan Museum.
Opening hours. The cathedral opens Monday to Saturday from 7 am to 7 pm and on Sunday from 8 am to 1 pm and from 4 pm to 7 pm. The Monumental Area opens Monday to Saturday from 9 am to 6 pm with last admission at 5.30, and on Sunday from 10 am to 6 pm with the same last admission.
What is closed. Access to the roofs is suspended for maintenance work on the covering, and with it the online sale of that ticket.
Where it is. On corso Vittorio Emanuele, between the Palazzo dei Normanni and the Quattro Canti, ten minutes on foot from the former and five from the latter.
How long it takes. The church alone takes twenty minutes. With the royal tombs, the crypt and the treasury, forty.
Photo credits: exterior by Angela Rosch Rodrigues, porch by Berthold Werner, cathedral by night by Benjamin Smith, imperial tombs by Holger Uwe Schmitt (CC BY-SA 4.0); interior and apses by trolvag (CC BY-SA 3.0); tomb of Roger II and sarcophagus of Constance of Aragon by Giovanni Dall’Orto (CC BY-SA 2.5 IT). All from Wikimedia Commons.
