Cefalù

Cefalù sits on a narrow strip of shore beneath a single enormous limestone headland, La Rocca, and the whole town seems to lean back against it. The Greeks who settled here in the fourth century BC named the place Kephaloidion after that rock — the word comes from their term for a head — and the silhouette still explains the town better than any map: a tight grid of honey-coloured lanes squeezed between cliff and sea, with the twin towers of a Norman cathedral rising out of the middle.

The cathedral is the reason Cefalù belongs to the UNESCO property of Arab-Norman Palermo, listed in 2015 together with the cathedrals of Monreale and Palermo. Tradition says King Roger II founded it in 1131 to honour a vow made to the Holy Saviour after he escaped a storm on this beach. Building dragged on until 1240 and the church was consecrated only in 1267, but the heart of it came early: the apse mosaics, begun in 1145, are dominated by a Christ Pantocrator of startling calm, one hand raised in blessing, the other holding an open Gospel of John. Above him the Virgin stands with raised hands between four archangels, and the apostles fill the tiers below in a carefully planned sequence. Roger meant to be buried here and had two porphyry sarcophagi placed in 1145; Frederick II moved them to Palermo in 1215. The façade's heavy towers each carry a small fifteenth-century spire, and the portico between them was added in 1472 by Ambrogio da Como. Behind the church, a cloister of pointed arches on slender paired columns became the pattern for later Norman cloisters across Sicily.

The rest of the old town rewards slow walking. Stretches of megalithic wall from the late fifth century BC still ring the historic centre; up on the Rocca, the so-called Temple of Diana is a sanctuary built of huge dolmen-like slabs over a far older cistern. Down in Via Vittorio Emanuele, a medieval washhouse is fed by spring water pouring from a row of cast-iron mouths, many shaped as lions' heads. The Osterio Magno on Corso Ruggero, traditionally linked to Roger II though probably fourteenth-century, was the seat of the Ventimiglia lords, and the Museo Mandralisca keeps Antonello da Messina's Portrait of a Man — the sly, half-smiling face often called the Unknown Sailor. Film lovers may recognise the seafront: Giuseppe Tornatore shot scenes of Cinema Paradiso (1988) here.

Getting there

Cefalù lies on the Tyrrhenian coast about 70 km east of Palermo and falls within the Madonie regional park; the nearest sizeable town is Termini Imerese, about 30 km west. The closest airport is Palermo's Falcone–Borsellino Airport (PMO), roughly 84 km away. Cefalù has its own station on the Palermo–Messina railway, which makes the train the simplest way in; the cathedral and old town are a short walk from the station.