Palermo Cathedral
— a cathedral the centuries kept rebuilding.
Not only on a wall.
“The cathedral stands on Via Vittorio Emanuele in the old centre of Palermo, a building the centuries kept rebuilding. Norman bell towers from the 1180s, a Catalan Gothic porch from the 1400s, a Neoclassical dome added at the close of the 1700s. The golden tufa limestone goes amber in late afternoon. Near the south porch one column still carries an Arabic inscription, preserved from the years the same walls held a mosque. Inside, the royal tombs of Roger II and Frederick II rest in deep red porphyry. The rooftop walk opens onto a view across old Palermo to Monte Pellegrino, the headland that closes the bay to the north.
Palermo Cathedral, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Palermo Cathedral stands on Via Vittorio Emanuele in the historic centre of Palermo, the capital of Sicily, on the island's northern coast. Construction began in 1185 under Archbishop Walter Ophamil during the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, on a site that had served previously as a Byzantine basilica and, during Arab rule of the city from 831 to 1072, as the congregational mosque of Balarm. The complex is part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 2015 as Arab-Norman Palermo and the Cathedral Churches of Cefalu and Monreale, a serial property of nine civil and religious buildings that document the cultural syncretism of twelfth-century Sicily under King Roger II and his successors.
The building reads as a stratigraphy of eight centuries of Sicilian rule. The crenellated bell towers and the apses date from the late twelfth century and are Norman in idiom; the south porch, built around 1465 in Catalan Gothic style, carries three pointed arches over a tympanum lined with porphyry and serpentine inlay; the great dome was added between 1781 and 1801 by Ferdinando Fuga during a Neoclassical refit that also reorganised the interior. Embedded in one of the porch columns is a Quranic inscription in Kufic script, a spolia preserved from the years the building was a mosque. The exterior is faced with the local golden tufa limestone, which shifts in tone through the day from pale straw at noon to amber at sunset.
The cathedral is open to visitors daily, with the main nave free to enter and a paid ticket required for the royal tombs, the treasury, the crypt, and the rooftop walk. The royal tombs hold the porphyry sarcophagi of King Roger II of Sicily, the Emperor Henry VI, Constance of Aragon, and the Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen, who died in 1250. The roof tour climbs above the apses and opens onto a panorama across the old city to Monte Pellegrino, the limestone headland that closes the bay to the north. The Festino di Santa Rosalia, the city's largest religious celebration, processes past the cathedral each year on the night of 14 July, marking the saint's deliverance of Palermo from the plague of 1624.