Chiostro del Duomo di Monreale

Behind the cathedral of Monreale lies the other half of William II's design: a square of garden ringed by paired columns, where every capital tells a different story and a sculpted fountain rises in one corner. Few cloisters anywhere reward slow looking as generously as this one.

Why it matters

The cloister belonged to the Benedictine abbey that made Monreale a power in its own right. When William II handed his unfinished church to the monks of Cava dei Tirreni in 1176, the monastery and its cloister were part of the bargain, and the whole ensemble was built out under his reign. Visit Sicily describes the garden enclosure as a square of about 47 by 47 metres, wrapped by 228 paired and decorated columns, and the municipal tourism portal calls the vast cloister one of the finest architectural exercises inspired by Muslim art in Sicily. It is also, simply, the place where the monument becomes intimate: the cathedral overwhelms with scale, while the cloister asks you to move bay by bay, reading stone like a manuscript. Since 2015 it belongs, with the cathedral, to the UNESCO World Heritage serial site covering Arab-Norman Palermo and the cathedrals of Cefalù and Monreale.

What to notice

Give the capitals the time they demand. The municipal portal's description singles out Romanesque capitals of astonishing variety: acanthus leaves that seem stirred by wind, birds pecking at scrolls, telamones bearing the weight of the arches, putti feeding animals, and turbaned figures entwined with serpents. Look for the capital of the donation, where William II offers the church to the Virgin, the sculptural statement of the entire foundation; a figure killing a bull alludes to the eastern cult of Mithras, and an acrobat balanced on his arms recalls the Trinacria, the symbol of Sicily. The paired colonnettes carry traces of polychrome mosaic incrustation, an orientalising touch that would have glittered differently at every hour. In the south-west corner stands the fountain: a circular basin from which a carved column rises, its shaft sculpted with rams, its corner columns weaving animals and human figures into luxuriant vegetation. The cathedral's municipal page calls it the fontana del re, the king's fountain, with a palm-trunk shaft.

Context and history

The cloister was laid out as the heart of monastic life at Santa Maria Nuova: processions, reading and work all moved around this garden. Its construction belongs to the same push that raised the cathedral between 1174 and the king's death in 1189, and the sources consulted name no individual sculptor for the capitals, whose stylistic variety suggests several hands. After the Norman period the abbey passed through successive regimes of canons and clergy, and the surrounding monastic buildings were repeatedly rebuilt, but the cloister's arcades survived them all. The pointed arches rest on those twin colonnettes, and the deliberate disorder of the capital subjects, which the municipal description reads as decorative rather than narrative, keeps the eye restless even today. Unlike the cathedral, which burned and was refitted in the nineteenth century, the cloister preserves its original twelfth-century substance with only the losses of time, which is why specialists treat it as a key document of late twelfth-century sculpture in Sicily.