Our trip to Sicily was a “hub and spokes” tour. This means that you stay in one place (the hub) and take daily trips (the spokes) to see the sights.  For our first four nights, we slept in Palermo while venturing out on tours of Palermo, Agrigento, Trapani and Marsala.  This schedule made it a very active trip and with the weather hovering around 80-degrees-plus every day, we got our exercise and didn’t feel too guilty about our recommended daily intake of pasta and gelato.

Sicily has a very complex history which is far beyond my powers to tell but take it from me – Sicily is the ultimate melting pot, having been invaded by the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Normans, a few Vandals and Goths, as well as Spaniards and Austrians.  For this reason, its architecture shows the influences of all these conquerors.  It has Norman palaces and the ruins of temples originally built by the Greeks and then taken over by the Romans. In an admirable upcycling move, the Romans merely switched the god or goddess honored there. Some of these temples were later turned into Christian churches.  The history of Sicily is wild.

On our first day, we took an amble to the Palazzo dei Normanni (The Norman Palace). The Normans showed up in Sicily in 1072 and began work on renovating the palace, which had originally been an Arab stronghold.  When the Norman King Roger II took over, he commissioned the building of the Palatine Chapel, which is a fabulous combination of Norman, Byzantine, and Arab styles. 

Some of my fellow tourists and I ducked out of our tour to go to the Royal Gardens next to the Palace and found a café that luckily also served cold beverages.  Since it was past noon and I was on vacation, I partook of an appropriately refreshing Aperol spritz. 

Sadly, the other people on our tour soon discovered us, so we joined them on their way to the Palermo Cathedral. The Cathedral contains, as you might imagine, an amalgamation of styles. But the most exciting thing about it was the gigantic boat outside the cathedral with the towering figure of a woman in it.  Who was this 50-foot woman?  None other than Saint Rosalia, the patron saint of Palermo, aka La Santuzza!

Her story is a compelling one. She was part of the household of King Roger II (see above). One day the King went hunting and was saved from being torn apart by a wild beast by one Count Baldwin. The grateful King offered him a reward, and the Count said he wanted to marry Rosalia, who was very beautiful and extremely young.  Rosalia was not interested in this at all and climbed up a nearby mountain to live in a cave and worship God.  She eventually died on the mountain when she was 30, circa 1166.

Fast forward to 1624, when a boat carrying sailors with the plague docks at Palermo. The city is devastated and many die, but Rosalia appears to a grieving widower and tells him to bring her bones from her mountain cave down to the city and have a procession and the pandemic will end.  He does as he is told, and the plague lifts from the city. Thus Rosalia became Palermo’s patron saint. She is the 50-foot woman in the boat which is taken through the streets of Palermo every July during her well-deserved festival. There is a stunning altar for her inside the cathedral as well.