Page 97 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

Piazza Bellini

Just around the corner from the Pretoria fountain, Piazza Bellini is largely a car park
by day, with vehicles jammed together next to part of the city’s old Roman wall. It’s
also home to three of Palermo’s most distinct churches, Santa Caterina, San Cataldo

and La Martorana. The first is Baroque, the latter two medieval, and you could do
far worse than to spend your first hour in the city succumbing to their charms.

Santa Caterina

Piazza Bellini • April–Oct Mon–Sat 9.30am–1.30pm & 3–7pm, Sun 9.30am–1.30pm; Nov–March Mon–Sat
9.30am–1pm & 3–5.30pm, Sun 9.30am–1pm • Free

Founded in 1566, when Palermo was still under Spanish rule, the exterior of Santa

Caterina has a certain gravitas, while the interior demonstrates Sicilian Baroque at its
most daftly exuberant, as subtle as a multi-coloured wedding cake, with every
centimetre of the enormous interior larded with pustular relief work, deep reds and
yellows filling in between sculpted cherubs, Madonnas, lions and eagles. One marble
panel (in the first chapel on the right) depicts Jonah about to be devoured by a
rubbery-lipped whale, with a Spanish galleon above constructed from wire with string
rigging.

San Cataldo
Piazza Bellini • April–Oct Mon–Sat 9am–2pm & 3.30–7pm, Sun 9am–2pm; Nov–March daily 9am–2pm • €2.50

The little Saracenic red golf-ball domes above Piazza Bellini belong to San Cataldo,
a squat twelfth-century chapel on a palm-planted bank above the square. Other than the

crenellations around the roof it was never decorated, and in the eighteenth century the
chapel was even used as a post office. It still retains a good mosaic pavement in an
otherwise bare and peaceful interior.

La Martorana

Piazza Bellini • Mon–Sat 9.30am–1pm & 3.30–5.30pm, till 6.30pm in summer, Sun 8.30–9.45am & noon–1pm
La Martorana is one of the finest surviving buildings of the medieval city. It was

paid for in 1143 by George of Antioch, King Roger’s admiral, from whom it received
its original name, Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio. After the Sicilian Vespers, the
island’s nobility met here to offer the Crown to Peter of Aragon, and under the Spanish
the church was passed to a convent founded by Eloisa Martorana – hence its popular
name. It received a Baroque going-over and its curving northern facade in 1588, but

happily this doesn’t detract from the great power of the interior; enter through the
twelfth-century campanile, an original structure that retains its ribbed arches and
slender columns. The church is a popular location for Palermitan weddings,
spectacular events that often culminate in the newlyweds releasing a dozen white