Palazzo dei Normanni — palace
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Palazzo dei Normanni

  • 2 min read
  • 38.111° N 13.353° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • In 1801 the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, working from an observatory installed in the palace's Pisan Tower, discovered Ceres, the first asteroid ever identified.
  • Piazzi named his find Cerere Ferdinandea, after the goddess Ceres, whose myth is set in Sicily, and after his patron King Ferdinand.
  • The palace observatory, founded in 1790 on the viceroy's initiative, is still a working research institute of Italy's National Institute for Astrophysics.
  • The Cappella Palatina holds the earliest surviving muqarnas ceiling made of wood; every known earlier example was built in brick or stone.
  • The ceiling's wooden pieces are only about one to one and a half centimetres across, joined with fibre bindings and animal glue.
  • The muqarnas vault carries no load at all: it hangs as a decorative shell beneath the chapel's real roof.
  • The Pisan Tower guarded the royal treasure, and its treasure room had four large jars sunk into the floor to store gold coins.
  • When Emperor Henry VI sacked the palace in 1194, chroniclers say a hundred mules were needed to carry off its gold and valuables.
  • In 1799 the painter Giuseppe Velasco covered the Hall of Hercules with the hero's labours; the Sicilian Regional Assembly now debates beneath them.
  • Excavations in the cellars have revealed Phoenician and Punic fortifications beneath the palace, dated roughly between the eighth and fifth centuries BC.

Why it is worth it

The Palazzo dei Normanni sits on the highest point of old Palermo, where an Arab emir's fortress once stood between two now-vanished rivers, and it has been a seat of power almost continuously for a thousand years. After the Norman conquest of 1072 the new rulers built a royal residence and administrative centre here, with four towers and textile workshops. It served the Norman kings Roger II, William I and William II, and then Frederick II, whose court nurtured the Sicilian School of poetry. Since 1946 it has housed the Sicilian Regional Assembly, making it one of the oldest royal residences in Europe still in official use.

Its treasure is the Cappella Palatina, the royal chapel commissioned by Roger II in 1132 above an older chapel that survives as the crypt. It is the finest single expression of the Norman-Arab-Byzantine art of twelfth-century Sicily: a three-aisled hall whose walls and dome shine with gold-ground mosaics, many of them by Byzantine artists of the 1140s, with Christ Pantocrator looking down from the dome. Over the nave hangs a wooden muqarnas ceiling of honeycomb vaults, a rare Islamic ceiling in a Christian church, painted with dancers, musicians, hunters, drinkers and animals and carrying some seventy-five inscriptions, many in Kufic script. Greek mosaics, Arabic woodwork and Latin liturgy share one room.

The rest of the palace carries the layers of later rulers. The Spanish viceroys added the Fountain Courtyard in 1584 and the Maqueda Courtyard in 1600, and the Bourbons decorated the Hall of Hercules. Among the royal apartments, the mosaic-decorated Hall of King Roger rivals the chapel itself. The chapel is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Arab-Norman Palermo and the cathedral churches of Cefalù and Monreale, inscribed in 2015.

Getting there

The palace is in the historic centre of Palermo; the visitor entrance is on Piazza Indipendenza, about 400 metres from the cathedral and some 1.5 km from Palermo Centrale station. City buses stop at Piazza Indipendenza. The nearest airport is Falcone–Borsellino (PMO), about 24 km away.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Palermo 8The Most Beautiful Places in Sicily 25The Most Beautiful Places in Italy 279The Most Beautiful Castles in Italy 8The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Sicily 8The Most Beautiful Palaces in Italy 9The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses in Italy 22The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Castles 24The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Palaces 38The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Italy 44The Most Beautiful Palaces 91The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 92The Most Beautiful Castles 94The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 302The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

The Palazzo dei Normanni, also called Royal Palace of Palermo, is a palace in Palermo, Sicily, Italy. It was the seat of the Kings of Sicily with the Hauteville dynasty and served afterwards as the main seat of power for the subsequent rulers of Sicily. Since 1946 it has been the seat of the Sicilian Regional Assembly. The building is the oldest royal residence in Europe; and was the private residence of the rulers of the Kingdom of Sicily and the imperial seat of Frederick II and Conrad IV.

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