Palermo hides its history in layers rather than monuments: a Qur'anic verse on a cathedral column, Greek-signed Byzantine mosaics, cells scratched by Inquisition prisoners, squares still empty from Allied bombs. Three days to read the palimpsest.
Begun 1185 on a mosque that was itself a Byzantine basilica; a Qur'anic verse survives carved on a portico column. The porphyry tombs of Roger II and Frederick II stand in the right aisle. Nave free, combined tombs-crypt-treasury-roof ticket €15.
Sicily's archaeology museum, in a 16th-century Filippini convent, holds the Selinunte temple metopes, the Palermo Stone fragment of Egyptian king lists, and Phoenician sarcophagi dug out of Palermo's own necropolis. Tue-Sat 09:30-18:30.
Five vermilion domes over a church consecrated in 1136 for Roger II and raised by Muslim craftsmen on an earlier mosque. The 13th-century cloister of paired columns and the cistern below belong to the vanished Benedictine monastery.
Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio, founded 1143 by George of Antioch, keeps Byzantine mosaics signed in Greek and an Arabic inscription running round the dome base. Beside it the red-domed San Cataldo of 1154 was never decorated at all.
Ernesto Basile completed Europe's third-largest opera house in 1897 after 22 years of works that levelled a convent — Palermitans blamed the delays on the evicted nuns. Guided tours leave roughly every 20 minutes, 09:30-18:00.
A lagoon until the 14th century, then the Inquisition's public execution ground. The garden at its centre, laid out in 1864, holds Ficus macrophylla whose aerial roots have since swallowed whole sections of the original railings.
Built in 1307 for the Chiaramonte family, it served as Holy Office prison from 1601 to 1782. The cells still carry graffiti — prayers, ships, calendars, protests of innocence — first read seriously by Leonardo Sciascia.
The 1582 gate closing the Cassaro's seaward end was deliberately left without an arch so the viceroy's ceremonial canopy could pass beneath. The lawn behind it is laid over rubble from the 1943 Allied raids that gutted the Kalsa.
Capuchin friars began drying corpses in these tufa corridors in 1599. Some 8,000 mummies hang sorted by profession, sex and marital status; Rosalia Lombardo, embalmed in 1920, lies in the chapel at the far end. 09:00-13:00, 15:00-18:00.
The Capo kept its Arab street plan of dead-end alleys built for defence, and its market has traded along the same lines since the 9th century. Porta Carini, rebuilt in 1782, marks where the old city wall once closed the quarter.
Matteo Carnelivari's 1495 Catalan-Gothic mansion, wrecked in 1943 and rebuilt by Carlo Scarpa in 1954. It holds the anonymous Triumph of Death fresco cut from Palazzo Sclafani and Antonello da Messina's Annunciata.
The Norman church of 1191, handed by Frederick II to the Teutonic Knights, lost its whole neighbourhood to the 1943 bombing — the open ground in front is a bomb site never rebuilt. Falcone and Borsellino grew up in these streets.