In the apse basin, across an area 13 metres by 7, Christ Pantocrator in a red and gold tunic and blue mantle holds his right hand open in the Greek gesture of blessing. Below him and along the whole church run 6,500 square metres of gold-ground mosaic, laid between the end of the twelfth century and the middle of the thirteenth by local and Venetian workshops. Work had begun in 1172 at the will of William II of Hauteville: legend speaks of treasure revealed in a dream by the Virgin beneath a carob tree, history of a contest of prestige with Walter Ophamil, archbishop of Palermo, who was rebuilding the capital's cathedral in the same years. Consecration came only on 25 April 1267.
What to see
The church is 102 metres long and 40 wide, a Latin cross with three naves divided by two rows of nine columns of grey oriental granite under classical Corinthian capitals. The mosaics read like an open book: in the nave the Old Testament from the Creation to Jacob wrestling the angel, in the transept the life of Christ up to Pentecost, in the sanctuary the celestial court around the Pantocrator, with two panels in which William II offers the model of the church to the Virgin and receives his crown from Christ. The ceiling is the one rebuilt after the fire of 11 November 1811, which burned the Fatimid-style beams and damaged mosaics and tombs; restoration went on until 1837. The royal tombs remain: the porphyry sarcophagus of William I, the marble one of William II, the burials of Margaret of Navarre and her sons, and the urn holding the viscera of Louis IX of France, who died at Tunis in 1270.
The bronze doors of the main portal are signed by Bonanno Pisano and dated 1185-1186; those of the side portal, beneath the Renaissance loggia raised between 1547 and 1569 by the Gagini on eleven round arches, are by Barisano da Trani. The southern flank opens into the Benedictine cloister, closed off around 1200: a square 47 metres to a side, pointed arches of double archivolt on 216 paired colonnettes, plain and inlaid with gold and glass tesserae in alternation, and carved capitals of which no two are alike, with biblical episodes, allegories and trades. In the southern corner a fountain rises on a shaft worked like a palm trunk.
Visiting
Monreale sits on the slopes of Monte Caputo, eight kilometres above Palermo: half an hour by the city buses that leave from piazza Indipendenza, or by car, left in the car parks below the centre, since the town is narrow and steep. Cathedral, roof terraces and cloister are ticketed separately, and the cloister, a state monument, keeps its own hours with a last admission before closing; visits stop during Mass. Shoulders and knees must be covered. Allow a good hour for the mosaics and another for cloister and terraces: since 2019 flights of stairs lead onto the roofs, among walkways and skylights, with the Conca d'Oro in front of you.
Our editors' tip
We go in as the doors open, when the nave is empty and the low light from the high windows sets the gold alight one scene at a time, and we save the cloister for midday, when the sun cuts through the arcades. Scholars have divided those capitals among four hands — the Master of the Dedication, the Master of the Putti, the Master of the Eagles and the Marble Carver — and trying to tell them apart on a single circuit of the square is the quickest way to grasp how much labour a thirteenth-century cloister contains.
