Wherein There Is A Surprising Lack of Classical Architecture

Sort of a lack of classical anything, actually! Haha, I lied--I forgot that we visited Palermo's classics museum. This is why I take pictures of things! We had a fairly easy and relatively non-classics-oriented Friday wandering around Palermo and the nearby town of Monreale before hopping on the ferryboat again to head back to Rome.

Our first stop was at the Zisa Palace in Palermo. This lovely Arabic-inspired building was a pleasure/diplomatic palace built by the Genoarde-Norman kings in the 12th century--and if you're wondering why that's not "classical", basically my academic interest in things drops sharply after about the 4th century CE :P The outside isn't much to look at, partially because the walls are six feet thick to keep out the heat, but the inside has some beautiful soaring arches and lots of gorgeous intricately carved wooden partitions. Sadly, there were no pictures allowed inside, so I only have pictures of the lavishly decorated room with an open wall facing the large fountain in the garden.

This was the back wall and main focus of the small outside room--I don't know what the room's purpose was, although I suspect it was just there to be pretty and impress visitors. It certainly impressed us!

The smaller arch in the center of the back wall was at one point a fountain, which would spill water into this channel, collect in pools, and then flow on to the main fountain of the garden (which was not very attractive with no water in it, so I don't have pictures). The fountain was fed by a Roman aqueduct, which is reason enough for me to like it!

Here are some close-ups of the mosaics, because they're beautifully done and I like mosaics. The neat thing about the Arabic influence in this area (the Arabs invaded Sicily in 837 and the island, particularly Palermo, flourished under their control, so there's lots of little influences like this) is that the mosaics tend to be geometric rather than iconic as Christian (and to an extent Roman) mosaics were.

This was the outside hallway we walked through to get to the small room, and its structure (the high vaulted ceilings with the Arabic pointed arches) is very similar to what we found inside the rest of the building. The inside wasn't quite this light, naturally, but the beautifully airy spaces were the same.

After we'd had a chance to wander through the palace while oohing and ahhing at all of the pretty artifacts inside (which I'm afraid I don't remember many of, because we were seeing thousands of cool things every day for a week, and it really is hard to remember everything when I can't take pictures to jog my memory), we piled back onto the bus for the short trip to the nearby town of Monreale, where there was a cathedral for us to visit. Incidentally, for those who are interested in this sort of thing, the term "cathedral" is actually quite specific, and has nothing to do with size or grandeur--it's the church that contains the seat of the local bishop (from the Greek cathedra, meaning seat). While the cathedral often does happen to be one of the largest or grandest churches in the area, that's not always the case--for an interesting example, the Pope's cathedral is Saint John Lateran, not Saint Peter's Basilica. Anyway, I find these sorts of linguistic diversions interesting, and now you've all learned something you may not have known before. Back to Monreale--this was a small Norman settlement, and the cathedral was built in this tiny town despite the fact that there was already one in Palermo, because the Norman king at the time made a deal with the Pope to found a monastery with episcopal rank. Possibly because it's such a huge church in such a small town, the cathedral was sort of a religious "one stop shop", with a choir school, cloister, convent, dormitory, and treasury among its features.

Behold! This is a biiig church.

Also apparently filthy rich--the gold in the mosaics alone of this church weighs 2,200 kg, spread over 6,400 square meters of mosaics. Obviously, this means that I have tons of pictures of these, because it's shiny and they're mosaics. I mean, duh.

One of the side aisles--note that even the beams have golden mosaics in them.

More mosaics! Note how the figures higher on the wall are also higher in Christian mythology--the bottom two rows are saints, above them are angels, and above them are the multi-winged seraphim.

I'm not sure what exactly is through this large oval hole--probably just the main hall (I was in one of the side halls taking this). I just liked the framing.

Even the floor was covered in mosaics, naturally. Again, there's a lot of these geometric designs, which are much more colorful than they appear in these photos. Got any good quilt ideas yet, Mom? :P

This is more what the color was like--bright reds, greens, and golds, with white outlines and blue accents.

Our next stop was right around the corner in the cloisters, which were very much like the Cefalù cloisters--a wide open courtyard surrounded by 228 twin columns, many of which were stolen reused from Roman ruins, with very few identical capitals.

We had gorgeous weather for this visit, didn't we? Rising up behind the colonnade are some of the cathedral's auxiliary buildings that I mentioned above.

As usual, I took way more pictures of various columns than necessary, so I've tried to pick out the best.And as usual, there has to be at least one capital--this is (roughly) a Composite capital, which combines the acanthus leaves of the Corinthian order with the scrolled volute of the Ionic order, because the Romans (who originally designed this) decided that the Corinthian capitals weren't quite fancy enough.

Yes, it's another capital, but this is quite unusual--the figure in the middle is a Mithras Tauroctony, which is an unnecessarily scholarly way to say that this a depiction of the key myth of the Mithrean faith. I mentioned this cult before--Mithras is the sun-god and shares several visual elements with that obscure little cult that would grow into Christianity--and given that many of the symbols are the same, it seems odd that this figure would be here, after Christianity did its best to eradicate the Mithras cult in Roman times.

At each of the four corners of the colonnade, there was a group of four columns like this, each fully carved. It's a very pretty effect, although I have to say I prefer fluting. Also, the black dot isn't a camera flaw, it's a hole in the column (explained below).

Columns decorated with even more mosaics! There didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to what the column's decoration was--fluting, carving, mosaics, and plain were all scattered together.

I know these look like strangely boring (ahaha) columns--no fluting, mosaics, or carving. But the holes are significant--these columns (and some others here) were taken from the ruins of the Roman seaside resort of Baiae, in Campania. The Romans liked the area of Baiae enough that when they ran out of land space, they simply built out into the sea (Roman concrete is awesome). Naturally, time passed and the sea level fluctuated, and today (and in the 12th century when this cathedral was built) parts of Baiae are underwater. So, these columns were taken from a part of Baiae that was underwater at some point for long enough that sea creatures bored these holes into the marble. And now you understand the terrible pun.

And here's me hanging out in the little fountain area that was in one of the corners. Yes, I know it's hard to see me--I wanted as much of the fountain as possible in the picture.

Our next stop was lunch on our own--yes, they really did leave us on our own for about three hours in the middle of an unknown city before meeting up again. Since we are BRILLIANT CLASSICS STUDENTS, it all worked out fairly well. I went along with some friends to a kebab place (note: these are not the kebabs you're thinking of--it's meat, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, sauce, etc. They're vaguely like a burrito but with middle eastern flavors, and they tend to be quite good and filling for pretty cheap), and managed to ask lots of picky questions and order entirely in Italian, which I was very proud of. We then met back up again at the little archaeological museum of Palermo, for our only real classics-related visit of the day. We didn't even have to take notes!

This was a bike mounted on the wall opposite the entrance to the museum. I have no clue why, but it was unusual so naturally I took a picture of it to share.

Like many of the museums in Italy, this building was originally a medieval building, so it had a lovely little courtyard. Yay, fountains!

Yay, fountains with turtles! I miss the turtle pond at Austin, so it was very nice to see this little guy. I think it's even the same kind of turtle.

Here's a much bigger sculptural depiction of the Mithras Tauroctony. The cult is not well understood and there's little solid evidence for what we think we know, but essentially this myth is that the sun god Mithras captures and sacrifices a white bull, from which life springs. One of these images, either sculpted or painted, would have been the centerpiece of any cult site.

The museum had a large collection of old books, in giant glass bookcases. I'm not sure why they were there, or how they were relevant (other than the fact that most of the books were of ancient Greek or Latin texts), but I love books and you don't see many of them in the museums we tend to visit.

A case full of beautiful shiny golden celebratory crowns :) My favorite!

Here's a close up of my favorite one--a laurel wreath fashioned out of gold.

This is...exactly what it looks like. The ancient world in general, and the Romans in particular, were somewhat obsessed with phallic symbols--they had many uses, including warding off the evil eye, bringing fertility, protecting doors, and many others. This is a theriomorphic phallus, which just means that it (sort of) has an animal form. Normally, if you get a bunch of college students looking at something like this, you're going to get lots of snickering and lewd jokes. But when you get a bunch of classics students looking at something like this, you get educated snickering and lewd jokes, as well as dragging all of your classmates and professors over to take a look.

The museum really wasn't that big, so we spent about an hour and a half there, and then had free time for a few hours to do whatever we wanted until we had to meet up to get on the boat. Several people wandered the city on their own, some went shopping, and a small group of us followed Franco around on a miniature tour of Palermo. Sadly, Franco's not the best tour guide in terms of information--we definitely saw some neat little corners of the city, but I don't have much to tell you about them.

This was one of our first stops--I don't remember if the entire fountain is ancient or just the statues that were all mythologically themed, but it was quite pretty although we couldn't get very close to it. Note the sky--it opened up shortly after, and we all ran to a church to take shelter from the pouring rain. I was very unhappy that this was the only time that day I had gone out without my umbrella.

The church we ended up in was in fact the one Franco was looking to bring us to, with more beautiful mosaics. About half of the church was covered in scaffolding for repairs, though, so I don't have many pictures. I really liked this deep blue sky design among all of the more usual golden walls covered with pictures of saints.

Our next stop once the rain had calmed down a bit, was unfortunately at a church that had already closed for the evening, so we walked on to the next interesting church that Franco knew of. He did a little bit of haggling at the door (they wanted a "donation" to let us inside, he argued that we were students, they eventually settled on a reduced fee), and one of the keepers of the church (she wasn't a nun, so I'm not sure what her official position was) told us the story of the church...in Italian. Franco translated approximately a fourth of it overall, and I caught bits and pieces, but I'm afraid I don't know all that much about it.

This was the main stained glass window, and you can see the red cross of the Knights Templar. That was the main bit of information that I gathered from her talk, and from other people knowing the symbol.

This was the other bit I understood--apparently this was originally an Arabic building (possibly a mosque), hence the high domed ceilings, the large red domes of which you can see in the second picture. The inside of the church was rather plain, but I did like the architecture!

After we left the church, we rambled our way back to the bus, seeing interesting little bits and pieces of the city on the way, including this fascist-era monument/building that is one of the rare few of its kind not to be torn down. It's behind a gate, for probably obvious reasons. The architecture is definitely striking and unusual...but I still think it's ugly.

We finally met up with everyone else at the bus as night settled over Palermo, and then we were off to the ferryboat for another overnight trip on our way back to Rome. Farewell Sicily!