Beneath this Sicilian ruin, in 2016, some thirty burials made in the northern European manner were found. It is not as strange as it sounds: those who built this church were Normans, that is descendants of northern men who had reached Sicily only a few generations earlier, and in the ground beside their church they buried as they buried back home. Studies are still under way.
What to see
In the district they call it the Chiesazza, the bad church, for the state it is in. It was probably built in 1068, after the Norman victory over the Arabs at Misilmeri, and remains one of the first buildings in Norman style put up on the island. It has a single nave with three apses and a crypt, and beside it in all likelihood stood the remains of a cenobium of Basilian monks, that is of Greek rite.
It stands on a rise just above the Tyrrhenian, in a strategic position. In 1134 king Roger the Second granted the monastery uncultivated land near Misilmeri to be brought under crop and pasture, and the right to cut wood in the forest then called Bacharìa, that is in the future Bagheria. At the end of the nineteenth century the heritage authority consolidated the ruins.
Visiting
The remains are in open country in the territory of Altavilla Milicia, half an hour from Palermo; you reach them by dirt road and path, with no ticket and no hours. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Count the apses: there are three, on a single-naved church. That is a Greek scheme, not a Latin one, and it tells you who prayed inside while the Normans put up the money. In a building this small three worlds live together: those who ruled, those who officiated, and those who had been driven out shortly before.