Palermo layers Byzantine gold mosaic over Fatimid muqarnas, then buries both under Baroque stucco and 20th-century Liberty facades. Three days of galleries, oratories, opera and puppet theatre trace how nine civilisations kept rebuilding on top of each other.
Sicily's finest painting collection in a 1490 Catalan-Gothic palace restaged by Carlo Scarpa in 1954. Antonello da Messina's Annunciata and the anonymous Triumph of Death fresco are the anchors. Tue–Sat 09:00–18:30, Sun 09:00–13:00, closed Mon.
Giacomo Serpotta spent 1685–1717 covering these walls in white stucco: chubby putti climbing curtains, allegorical women in Spanish court dress, and a Battle of Lepanto relief crowded with rigging and cannon smoke. Mon–Sat 10:00–18:00.
A restored 15th-century convent holding 200-plus works of Sicilian and Italian art from 1800 to 1950 — Franz von Stuck's Il Peccato, Ettore De Maria Bergler's Liberty-era landscapes, Renato Guttuso's post-war realism. Tue–Sun 09:30–18:30.
Ernesto Basile's 1899 Liberty villa for the Florio dynasty mixes Norman turrets, Art Nouveau ironwork and Japanese-inspired timber. A 1962 fire gutted the interior; restoration reopened the ground floor with original stained glass.
Italy's largest opera house, opened 1897 to Giovan Battista Filippo Basile's design, then shut from 1974 to 1997 in a scandal-ridden 'brief restoration'. Tours run every 30 minutes 09:30–18:00 in Italian, English, French and Spanish.
Trading since 1860 on the pedestrianised street where Palermo's theatre crowd regroups between matinees. Cannoli filled to order, granita di gelsi, and a long marble counter where standing at the bar costs roughly half the table price.
Around 5,000 puppets from Sicily, Naples, Belgium, Rajasthan, Java and Burkina Faso, plus the armoured Opera dei Pupi paladins UNESCO listed in 2001. The museum runs its own theatre with live shows in the top-floor hall.
Mimmo Cuticchio is the last puppeteer still improvising the cuntu — the sung, spoken chronicle of Charlemagne's paladins. Shows follow Orlando and Rinaldo through episodic battles with clanging metal armour and hand-painted scenery.
Roughly 8,000 mummified Palermitans hang in corridors sorted by profession, sex and status, from 1599 until 1920. The last interred was two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo, embalmed in 1920 and still remarkably intact behind glass.
Five red domes over a 1136 Norman church built on an earlier mosque, with a 13th-century cloister of twin columns wrapped in jasmine, citrus and pomegranate. The bare interior deliberately strips back later Baroque additions.
Housed in a 16th-century Oratorian monastery, holding the metopes from the Selinunte temples, the Palermo Stone fragment of Egyptian royal annals, and the largest collection of Punic and Greek antiquities in Sicily.
The half-abandoned market square is now Palermo's open-air gallery: Uwe Jäntsch's installations on the ruined Palazzo Rammacca, murals by Igor Scalisi Palminteri, and Renato Guttuso's famous 1974 painting of the market hanging elsewhere.