Palermo: what to see, where to stay and how to get around
For two hundred years from 831 Palermo was an Arab city, one of the largest in Europe, and when the Normans took it in 1072 they kept the Arab craftsmen, the Greek mosaicists and the Arabic language at court. What they built together — churches with red domes, a chapel with an Islamic ceiling over Christian saints — is unlike anything else in Europe. Two to three hours, flat, and shoulders covered for the churches.
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A short history of Palermo
The Phoenicians founded Palermo in the 8th century BC, and the Greeks called it Panormos, 'all harbour'. In 831 the Arabs captured it, and for about two hundred years it was one of the largest cities in the Muslim world. In 1072 the Normans took it and built churches and palaces with red domes and gold mosaics, combining Arab, Byzantine and Western styles. A large Jewish community lived in the city until it was expelled in 1492 together with all the Jews of Sicily, which was then under Spanish rule. In 1860 Garibaldi entered the city, and it was annexed to Italy. In 2015 the Arab-Norman buildings were declared a World Heritage Site.
The ten best sights in Palermo
1Palazzo dei NormanniThe royal palace, still Sicily’s parliament; closed some days for sessions
2Cappella PalatinaByzantine mosaics under an Arab painted ceiling; go at opening
3Palermo CathedralThe tombs of the Norman kings and the emperor Frederick II; climb the roof
4La MartoranaA Greek church of gold mosaics, and Christ crowning a Norman king
5San CataldoThree red domes on a bare stone box; Arab builders, Norman patron
6San Giovanni degli EremitiRed domes and a cloister garden of citrus
7Quattro CantiThe baroque crossroads that divides the old town in four
8Fontana PretoriaA fountain of naked statues the town called the fountain of shame
9Teatro MassimoThe largest opera house in Italy; the steps of the last Godfather scene
10Teatro PoliteamaA circus-shaped theatre with a bronze chariot on top
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What is an audio walk?
Tours in Palermo →A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Palermo:
Free walking tours in Palermo
Arab builders, Norman kings
For two hundred years from 831 Palermo was an Arab city, one of the largest in Europe, and when the Normans took it in 1072 they kept the Arab craftsmen, the Greek mosaicists and the Arabic language at court. What they built together — churches with red domes, a chapel with an Islamic ceiling over Christian saints — is unlike anything else in Europe. Two to three hours, flat, and shoulders covered for the churches.
- Cappella Palatina · Roger II, the first Norman king of Sicily, built this chapel in his palace from 1132. The walls are Byzantine gold mosaics of Christ and the saints; the wooden ceiling above them was carved and painted by Muslim artists from the Fatimid world, with dancers, musicians and men drinking wine — the only such Islamic painted ceiling to survive whole.
- Porta Nuova · The gate beside the palace was put up in 1583 for Charles V’s victory in Tunis, and on its outer face four turbaned Moorish prisoners are carved holding up the arch. From here the old main street runs straight down through the town to the sea.
- San Giovanni degli Eremiti · Five red domes on a plain block of stone, built by Roger II around 1140 over an older building that may have been a mosque. Behind it is a small cloister garden of lemons and palms, and nothing in it would look out of place in North Africa.
- La Martorana · Built in 1143 by Roger’s admiral, George of Antioch, a Greek, and still used by the Albanian community for the Byzantine rite. Inside, a mosaic shows Christ crowning Roger II, who is dressed as a Byzantine emperor. The nuns of the convent next door invented frutta martorana, marzipan shaped and painted to look exactly like fruit.
- Quattro Canti · The two main streets of the old town cross here, and in the early seventeenth century the corners were rebuilt as four curved baroque façades, each with a season, a Spanish king and a patron saint of one of the four quarters. Depending on the hour, the sun lights one corner after another.
- Palermo Cathedral · Built in 1185 on the site of the great mosque, which had itself been a church, and one column of the porch still carries a verse of the Quran. Inside are the porphyry tombs of the Norman kings and of Frederick II, the emperor who grew up in this city, spoke Arabic, and was called the wonder of the world.
Markets, mummies and the Mafia
Palermo’s street life is the loudest in Italy — markets where the sellers still sing their prices in a dialect full of Arabic — and its recent history is the hardest. This route goes from the markets and street food to the Inquisition’s prison and the places where the town stood up to the Mafia after the murders of 1992. Half a day, on foot and a short taxi.
- Ballarò · The oldest market in Palermo, running for a thousand years through the Albergheria. The sellers shout and sing — the abbanniata, a market chant whose roots go back to the Arab souk — and between the fish and the vegetables are the stalls of street food: panelle, chickpea fritters in a bun, and arancine, which in Palermo are round and feminine.
- Piazza Meschita · This was the heart of the Giudecca, one of the largest Jewish communities in medieval Europe, and the square is named after its synagogue — meschita, from the Arabic for a mosque, because that is what the Jews of Arab Palermo called their house of prayer. In 1492 Spain, which ruled Sicily, expelled them all. In 2017 the archdiocese gave the small new community an oratory nearby to use as a synagogue again.
- Antica Focacceria San Francesco · Open since 1834, and the place to try pani câ meusa — a soft bun of boiled spleen and lung fried in lard, with cheese or with lemon. In 2005 its owner refused to pay protection money and testified against the Mafia in court, and the town treated eating here as a statement.
- Palazzo Steri · A fourteenth-century palace that became the prison of the Spanish Inquisition in Sicily for two centuries. When the plaster was removed from the cell walls in the twentieth century, the drawings and writings of the prisoners came to light — ships, saints, prayers, maps, protests of innocence — and they can be read today.
- Piazza Magione · A square of the Kalsa that was flattened by Allied bombing in 1943 and left as rubble for decades. Two boys who grew up in these streets, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, became the magistrates who put hundreds of Mafiosi on trial in the 1980s.
- The Falcone Tree · On the twenty-third of May 1992 the Mafia blew up the motorway from the airport under Falcone’s car, killing him, his wife and three bodyguards; fifty-seven days later a car bomb killed Borsellino. The ficus outside Falcone’s home became the town’s memorial, and people still pin notes, drawings and letters to it.
Gold on the hill
Above Palermo the Norman kings built their greatest church, and the whole inside is gold. Around the city are the places Palermo goes to breathe: the mountain of its patron saint, the beach at Mondello, and the strange villa of monsters at Bagheria. Half a day to a day, by bus or car.
- Monreale Cathedral · William II began it in 1174, and within about ten years the walls were covered in more than six thousand square metres of gold mosaic — the whole Bible, from the creation to the apostles, with a giant Christ in the apse. The cloister beside it has over two hundred twin columns, each carved differently, some with Arab patterns.
- La Zisa · A summer palace begun by William I around 1165, named from the Arabic al-Aziz, the splendid. It was air-conditioned the Arab way: water ran through a fountain room on the ground floor, and wind towers drew the cooled air up through the building.
- Capuchin Catacombs · From the late sixteenth century the friars here dried their dead and, later, those of anyone who could pay, and dressed them and stood them along the corridors. There are around eight thousand. The last, a two-year-old girl named Rosalia Lombardo who died in 1920, was embalmed so well that she looks asleep.
- Santa Rosalia Sanctuary · In 1624, with the plague raging, bones found in a cave on Monte Pellegrino were said to be those of Rosalia, a hermit who had lived there five hundred years earlier. They were carried through the city, the plague ended, and she became Palermo’s patron. The cave is now a church, with water dripping from the rock.
- Mondello · A fishing village that became Palermo’s beach in the early twentieth century, with an Art Nouveau bathing pavilion standing on piles in the water. The sand is white, the water turquoise, and on a summer Sunday half the city is here.
- Villa Palagonia, Bagheria · In the eighteenth century a prince of Palagonia lined the walls of his villa with dozens of stone monsters — dwarfs, musicians, animals with human heads. Goethe visited in 1787 and called it madness, and the villa has been known as the villa of monsters ever since.
Getting to Palermo and getting around
- Falcone-Borsellino Airport · Named after the two judges the Mafia killed; forty minutes by bus or train
- Palermo Centrale · Trains to Cefalù and the airport, at the foot of the old town
Cheap eats in Palermo
Palermo is one of the great street-food cities of the world, and most of it costs a couple of euro. The essentials: panelle, chickpea fritters in a sesame bun; arancine, rice balls — round here, and called by the feminine name; sfincione, a thick sponge pizza with onions and breadcrumbs; and for the brave, pani câ meusa, boiled spleen fried in lard. Cannoli are filled to order, so the shell stays crisp.
- Antica Focacceria San Francesco · The spleen sandwich and panelle since 1834
- Ballarò · Panelle, octopus and stigghiola, standing
- Vucciria · Street grills and cheap beer after dark
- Mercato del Capo · Arancine and sfincione from the bakeries in the market
- La Martorana · Marzipan fruit, invented by the nuns next door
- Mondello · Fried seafood in a paper cone on the front
Museums in Palermo
Palermo’s Arab-Norman buildings are a world heritage site of their own, and its museums hold what Sicily’s many conquerors left: Greek temple sculpture, Gothic frescoes, Renaissance painting — and the walls of a prison where the Inquisition held its victims.
- Palazzo Steri · The Inquisition’s cells and the prisoners’ graffiti
- Palazzo Abatellis · The Triumph of Death and the Annunciata
- Museo Salinas · Greek temple carvings from Selinunte
- Cappella Palatina · Byzantine gold under an Islamic ceiling
- No Mafia Memorial · Photographs and documents of the anti-Mafia struggle
- La Zisa · An Arab-style palace and a museum of Islamic art
Nature and day trips near Palermo
Palermo lies in the Conca d’Oro, the golden shell, a plain of citrus groves ringed by limestone mountains. Monte Pellegrino closes the bay to the north, and west along the coast are some of the wildest shores in Italy, protected as reserves.
- Zingaro Reserve · Coast path and coves, no road, no shade
- Scopello · Sea stacks and the old tuna fishery
- Santa Rosalia Sanctuary · Monte Pellegrino, the mountain over the city
- Orto Botanico · Giant ficus trees with roots like walls
- Mondello · White sand between two headlands
- Erice · A cable car up to a town in the clouds
Things to do in Palermo with kids
Palermo is loud and busy, and children either love it or tire fast. The easy wins are a beach day at Mondello, the giant trees of the botanical garden, and the villa of monsters. The catacombs are best left to adults.
- Mondello · Shallow sandy beach
- Orto Botanico · Trees to climb inside the roots of
- Villa Palagonia, Bagheria · Count the monsters on the walls
- Villa Giulia · A public garden with space to run
- Teatro Massimo · Guided tours of a giant opera house
- Foro Italico · A long lawn by the sea for the evening
Holy places in Palermo
Palermo’s churches were built by Christian kings with Muslim craftsmen and Greek artists, over the site of mosques that had been churches. And in the heart of the old town is the quarter of a Jewish community that lived here for fifteen centuries, until 1492.
- Piazza Meschita · The old Jewish quarter and the name of its synagogue
- Monreale Cathedral · Gold mosaics over every wall
- La Martorana · Byzantine rite and Norman mosaics
- San Cataldo · Three red domes, almost bare inside
- Palermo Cathedral · A Quran verse on a porch column
- Cefalù Cathedral · The great mosaic Christ of the Normans
Nightlife in Palermo
Palermo eats late and goes out later. The old market squares turn into open-air bars after dark, the Vucciria first among them, and the young crowd spreads through the lanes of the Kalsa. In summer the night moves to Mondello.
- Vucciria · Grills, beer and music in the old market
- Piazza Magione · The Kalsa bars around the lawn
- Teatro Massimo · Opera, and the steps of the Godfather
- Foro Italico · The evening walk by the sea
- Mondello · Beach bars and summer nights
Frequently asked questions about Palermo
What is there to see in Palermo?
The top sights in Palermo are Palazzo dei Normanni, Cappella Palatina and Palermo Cathedral. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.
How many days do you need in Palermo?
Three to four days are enough to see the best of Palermo without rushing, including at least one walking tour.
Is there a free walking tour in Palermo?
Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Palermo, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: Arab builders, Norman kings.
How do you get to Palermo and get around?
The main ways are Falcone-Borsellino Airport and Palermo Centrale. Full details are in the transport section on this page.
Where to stay in Palermo, and for how much?
sleepntrip shows only rooms in Palermo that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.
Looking for a hotel in Palermo for your dates?
Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.