San Giovanni degli Eremiti

San Giovanni degli Eremiti is the most photographed church in Palermo after the cathedral, a small Norman building topped with five bright red bulbous domes that pin it instantly to medieval Sicily. The stripped-back interior contains almost nothing — the original mosaics were lost long ago — but the architectural shell and the adjoining cloister are the point of the visit.

The cloister, with its pointed double arches on twin colonnettes, is one of the most peaceful spaces in the city. The garden of citrus and palms remains as Norman gardens did, evoking the lost luxury of the 12th-century court. Modest admission fee, often quiet even in summer.

things to do sight architecture religion
A story
The five small red domes for which San Giovanni is famous are the most explicitly Islamic features of any Christian church in Italy — they are stylistically identical to mosque domes from contemporary Cairo or Tunis. The church was built in the 1130s on the site of an earlier mosque whose foundations were never demolished. Local legend claimed for centuries that a wolf-taming hermit lived in the cloister; the more sober archaeology suggests a small monastery of Benedictines, who used the cells originally meant for Muslim worship.

Other places in Things to Do