Arab-Norman Heritage
Private tours of the Arab-Norman UNESCO sites in Sicily: Cappella Palatina, Monreale cathedral, Cefalù — read by a doctoral art historian.
Arab-Norman Heritage
The Arab-Norman period in twelfth-century Sicily is the one moment in European history when a Latin Christian crown, an Arab chancery, and Byzantine mosaicists worked in the same building. Roger II and his grandson William II commissioned three cathedrals that together form a single narrative — the Cappella Palatina inside the Palazzo dei Normanni in Palermo, the vast Monreale cathedral above the Conca d'Oro, and the smaller but formally more humane cathedral at Cefalù on the north coast. UNESCO inscribed the ensemble in 2015. GIORIZZ reads them as one building in three locations with an art historian whose doctorate is on the period, moving through them in the order that explains the commission rather than the order that fits the ticket line.