Italy Guide
Sicily
Quattro Canti district
The Quattro Canti or "four corners" is the traditional center of Palermo. On the southwest corner of Quattro Canti (entrance on Corso Vittorio Emanuele), San Giuseppe dei Teatini (Mon– Sat 7.30–11am & 6–8pm, Sun 8.30am–12.30pm & 6–8pm), begun in 1612, is the most harmonious of the city's Baroque churches. Outside, across Via Maqueda, is Piazza Pretoria, floodlit at night to highlight the nude figures of its great central fountain, a racy sixteenth-century Florentine design. The piazza also holds the restored Municipio, while towering above both square and fountain is the massive flank of Santa Caterina (daily 9.30am–1pm; April– Oct also afternoons), Sicilian Baroque at its most exuberant, every inch of the enormous interior covered in a wildly decorative, pustular relief-work.
Piazza Bellini, just around the corner, is the site of two wildly contrasting churches. The little Saracenic red domes belong to San Cataldo, a perfectly proportioned twelfth-century Byzantine chapel flooded with light (daily 9.30am–1pm; summer also afternoons 3.30–6pm; €1). Never decorated, it retains a good mosaic floor. San Cataldo's understatement is more than offset by the splendid intricacy of the adjacent La Martorana (Mon– Sat 8am–1pm & winter 3.30–5pm, summer 3.30–7pm, Sun 8.30am–1pm; free) – one of the finest survivors of the medieval city. With a Norman foundation, the church received a Baroque going-over in 1588. Happily, the alterations don't detract from the power of the interior, entered through the slim twelfth-century campanile, which retains its ribbed arches and slender columns. A series of spectacular mosaics, animated twelfth-century Greek works, are laid on and around the columns supporting the main cupola. Two original mosaic panels have been set in frames on the walls just inside the entrance to the church: a kneeling George of Antioch (the church's founder) dedicating La Martorana to the Virgin, and King Roger being crowned by Christ.