Norman mosaic gold in a fishing village below a crag — the most perfectly composed medieval town in Sicily, 70km from Palermo
Cefalù is a small coastal town on the Tyrrhenian Sea 70km east of Palermo — a Norman Arab fishing village built between the sea and a massive sandstone crag (the Rocca, 270m) that creates one of the most dramatically composed townscapes in Sicily. The Cathedral of Cefalù (Duomo di Cefalù, 1131), commissioned by Roger II after surviving a storm at sea, contains the greatest mosaic cycle of the Norman Sicily period: the Christ Pantocrator in the apse mosaic (completed 1148) is considered the finest Byzantine-influenced mosaic image in the western Mediterranean — larger than the famous Monreale…
Cefalù (Greek Kephaloidion) was a Greek settlement, then Carthaginian, then Roman — its Norman transformation was the most significant: Roger II, the Norman King of Sicily, vowed to build a cathedral here after being saved from a storm in 1131 and created one of the supreme expressions of the syncretistic Norman-Arab-Byzantine culture that made 12th-century Sicily the most culturally sophisticated kingdom in Europe. The Palermo-centred Norman court brought together Arab astronomers, Byzantine mosaic artists, Greek scholars, and Latin clergy — the Cefalù cathedral was part of this project, int…