Built around 1710 together with a monastery of Theatine nuns, the church of San Gaetano belongs to a precise season in Monreale's history: the opening decades of the eighteenth century, when religious building sites followed one another through the historic centre almost without pause. The dates tell the story on their own: San Giuseppe in 1700, the Ritiro in 1703, San Pietro in 1707, the Rosario in 1709, Sant'Isidoro in 1714, Sant'Antonio di Padova in 1720, the Santissima Trinità with the Collegio di Maria in 1724.
The dedication matches the residents: San Gaetano is Gaetano da Thiene, the sixteenth-century founder of the Theatine order, and the convent housed nuns of that same order.
What to see
Read the place as a whole, church and monastery together, as one piece of early eighteenth-century Monreale. Its date, around 1710, puts San Gaetano almost exactly at the midpoint of that run of building sites. In a town the world knows for its Norman cathedral and 7,584 square metres of mosaics, these buildings tell of the other Monreale — the one that, five centuries after William II, was still adding churches and religious houses to its streets.
Visiting
The church stands in the historic centre, a short distance from the cathedral, in a town that sits at about 310 metres at the foot of Monte Caputo, four kilometres from Palermo; everything is easily covered on foot. The smaller churches do not keep hours as regular as the cathedral's, so if you find the door closed, treat the building as a waypoint for reading eighteenth-century Monreale from the street.
Our editors' tip
Use San Gaetano as the starting point of a small early-1700s itinerary: dates in hand — 1700, 1703, 1707, 1709, circa 1710, 1714, 1720, 1724 — half an hour's walk reassembles a quarter century of construction. It is a way of seeing Monreale that the crowds heading for the mosaics miss almost entirely.