Whatever the UK electorate decides about staying in or leaving the EU, many of us in the British Isles feel a sense of identity with the Normans. Our genes, our language, our architecture, our laws can to a large extent be traced back to Norman roots.
Rather uncouth Norsemen invaded the north of France around 900 and after little more than 150 years at their French finishing school invaded England. We now represent the legacy of these Normans, don’t we? Well, no, because they also invaded somewhere else that surprised me: Sicily. I am still reading John Julius Norwich’s history of Sicily (From Norwich to Venice) and can tell you about it. They didn’t find Sicily such a push-over as England and it was thirty-one years from the beginning of their campaign before two Norman brothers, Robert and Roger de Hautville, entered Palermo and claimed the island in 1072.
The Normans were not just good warriors, they were good rulers and administrators. They created a united Sicily and have left behind a magnificent legacy: churches and works of art which we can still see today.
This is the Duomo di Cefalù. Work started in 1131 but it was not completed and consecrated until 1271, after the Normans had been vanquished. Behind its fortress-like facade is something special; a mosaic of The Christ Pantokrator, made in the middle of the 12th century.
Even finer architecture and mosaics can be seen at Monreale. The duomo, cloisters and mosaics combine to form one of the most spectacular examples of the Norman style anywhere on the island, or indeed the world. JJN opines, “no one can fail to be impressed by Monreale, ablaze as it is with over an acre and a half of superb mosaics, all completed within five or six years, between 1183 and the end of the decade”.
Here is the interior and some of the mosaics are at the top of this post. The Normans ruled until Christmas Day 1194, when the Emperor Henry VI was crowned in Palermo and the Normans booted out. However, there must still be much Norman blood flowing through Sicilian veins today, although I don’t think of them as close cousins. Don’t let’s leave Sicily just yet.
Film trailers often make a lousy film look good but this one makes one of Luchino Visconti’s masterpieces, Il Gattopardo, look really tacky, so if you haven’t seen it please don’t be put off – but do try and see it on a big screen.
Excellent again. Perhaps a Christopher’s Blog trip to Scilly would be the natural extension of your activities. ( What has happened to the Blog Travel Club suburban walks?). We should include Durham Cathedral where the influence of Scillian Moorish design is very marked not the least the chevrons on the columns. Robert and Roger must have sent over one of their clever chaps.
I am as much a fan of Il Gattopardo as you. People must not forget that the film is just part of a magnificent trio. The original “novel” and the more recent biography of Lampadusa by David Gilmour are also musts on the arty bucket lists for us all. Crumbling aristo families and their buildings have an extraordinary appeal, not just to the Anglo Irish!
I am contemplating a walk in the Madonie mountains in the north of Sicily in the autumn and I will plan a day walk closer to home soon.
Your hopscotch of a blog has brought us to Norman Sicily, which I long to visit, as part of a general yearning to know the Levant. (Besides, it would make a very moody part of any person’s pilgrimage through the Romanesque.) In your list of ideal travel books why not include the Etonians Robert Byron, with his The Byzantine Achievement, and (drawing master) Wilfrid Blunt, with his Persian Spring? And one could lob in the furrier J G Links’ Venice (recommended by Bernard Levin as the best such work on any city) and anything by the rag-trade’s finest, Eric Newby, both men of a period when the West End had real glamour. I don’t know the Links city guide, but admire anyone who is both a thriller-writer and art historian; and of Newby I only know his The Last Grain Race, but I hugely admire its understatement. His Mediterranean writing is, I bet, worthwhile.
I have read Byron’s The Road to Oxiana but nothing else by him. I will look out for The Byzantine Achievement and Blunt’s Persian Spring – an unintendedly prophetic title. Newby’s books I am fairly familiar with; A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Love and War in the Apennines are my favourites. Thank you for your suggestions.