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 San Cataldo Church |
 Quattro Canti |
 Palermo Cathedral |
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 St. Francis Chruch |
 Palermo city |
 St. John's of the Hermits |
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 Mosaic Icon of Christ Pantokrator |
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 Monreale Cathedral |
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| Monreale, from "Mons Regalis" (Royal Mountain), is a town of some 25,000 residents located on the slope of Mount Caputo (764 Meters) about 7 kilometers south of Palermo's center. Monreale overlooks the "Conca d'Oro," the beautiful valley beyond Palermo, and the town itself is situated at an altitude of roughly 300 Meters above sea level. No trip to Palermo is truly complete without a visit to Monreale. | |||||||||||
| Monreale is world-renowned for its cathedral, a dazzling mixture of Arab, Byzantine and Norman artistic styles framed by traditional Romanesque architecture, all combined in a perfect blend of the best that both the Christian and Muslim worlds of the 12th century had to offer. to view some elements of Sicilian church architecture. The beautiful mosaics in Monreale Cathedral are said to be one of the world's largest displays of this art, surpassed only by Istanbul's famous Basilica of Saint Sofia, once an Orthodox church . | |||||||||||
| (Unfortunately, many of those beautiful mosaics were destroyed when the Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453.) Monreale's mosaics emblazon 6,340 square meters of the duomo's interior surface, more than those of the splendid church of Saint Mark in Venice. | |||||||||||