Palermo Cathedral

Palermo Cathedral tickets: which one to buy

The church is free to enter; the paid parts are sold as a combined ticket and are worth the small sum. They are the royal tombs, where Frederick II and Roger II lie in porphyry sarcophagi; the treasury, with the jewelled crown of Constance of Aragon taken from her tomb; the crypt, with Roman and medieval sarcophagi reused by archbishops; and the roof walk, which climbs to the terraces for a view over the Cassaro and down onto the domes. The roof is the one to prioritise.

Guided tours of Palermo include the cathedral and cost several times the ticket. A joint pass with Monreale and Cefalu, the other churches in the same UNESCO listing, is sold as a circuit. Queues are rarely long. The cathedral sits on a broad terrace above the main street, so the exterior can be walked round at any hour without paying anything. The ticket desk is inside the south porch, and staff sell the combined version only if you ask for it by name.

Visiting Palermo Cathedral: what to see

Walter Ophamil, the Norman archbishop, built the cathedral in 1185 on the site of a basilica that the Arabs had converted into a mosque, and the building has been altered ever since. The result is a collage: Norman apses with interlaced arches at the east end, a Catalan Gothic porch on the south, Islamic inscriptions still legible on one of the columns of the west door, and a neoclassical dome dropped on top by Ferdinando Fuga in the 1780s, whose renovation also gutted much of the medieval interior.

That interior is now cool, grey and rather empty, which makes the tombs and the treasury the substance of a visit. A brass meridian line of 1801 runs across the floor with signs of the zodiac in marble, and a hole in the dome drops a spot of light onto it at noon. The exterior, seen from the garden on the south side, is the best Norman-Arab facade in Sicily. Santa Rosalia, the city's patron, lies in a silver casket in a side chapel, and her festival in July closes the street outside for three days.

Palermo Cathedral opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from morning to evening, with the paid sections closing earlier and not opening at all on Sunday mornings. The roof walk stops in bad weather. Palermo is very hot from June to September and the terraces have no shade; go early or in the last hour. The cathedral is on the route of every city tour, so mid-morning brings groups. Dress code is applied at the door, shoulders and knees covered.

Photography without flash is allowed. Allow half an hour for the church, an hour and a quarter with the tombs and the roof. The Palatine Chapel is a ten-minute walk up the same street and makes the obvious pairing; doing both before lunch is comfortable. Evening light on the honey-coloured stone of the south front is the best of the day, and the terrace is a popular meeting place after dark.