The best way of getting to Palermo is on the night boat from Naples. If you wake in the early hours, you can go on deck and see Stromboli glowing fitfully like an ogre’s cigar, but the approach to Palermo in the early morning sunshine is reward enough. Few cities have a more theatrical setting: the Conca d’Oro, or Golden Shell, formed by Monte Pellegrino on the northern side and Capo Zafferano on the southern, still make you catch your breath.

Sicily marked the western extremity of the Greek world, which extended eastwards to Asia Minor and beyond. The Greeks gave it the name Panormus, meaning “all harbour”, but never made it a proper colony – probably because the Phoenicians from Carthage had got there first and turned it into one of their biggest trading posts. Consequently, Greek monuments must be sought elsewhere – at Segesta, Selinunte and Agrigento, or at Syracuse, where the temple has been transformed into the present cathedral. Nor will you find much left by the Romans. For them, Sicily was just another province – quite a useful one, since the land was amazingly fertile and provided the capital with a large proportion of its grain, but a province nonetheless.

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Markets and masterpieces

The best way to enjoy the colourful, chaotic and challenging city of Palermo is to adopt a strategy determined by the length of your stay, the sort of neighbourhood you want as your base or which of Palermo’s historical periods you want to explore, writes Mary Taylor Simeti.

If you’re planning a lengthy and luxurious stay, head for the Hotel Villa Igiea, a monument to Belle Epoque Palermo. It has a glorious terrace and garden overlooking the port. It’s not close to the city centre but on your way there you could stop off for marvellous ice-cream or pastries at Bar Alba or take a ride to Mondello, Palermo’s seaside resort, to see the art nouveau villas and to eat seafood at Da Giovanni.

If art nouveau intrigues you, visit the new Galleria d’Arte Moderna, just reopened in the impeccably restored Convent of Sant’Anna, and then move on to view more of the little-known and absolutely lovely paintings of the 19th-century Sicilian landscape school, this time at the Museo Mormino in Via della Libertà.

If you want to be within walking distance of the centre, you could stay at the comfortable Hotel Principe di Villafranca and eat seafood at my favourite, the Trattoria Piccolo Napoli.

In the historic centre, there’s the very popular bed and breakfast, BB22. A two-minute walk will take you past a Serpotta masterpiece, the Oratorio del Rosario, and into Piazza San Domenico, where you’ll find great ice-cream at the Gelateria Lucchese and a good dinner at Ristorante Sant’Andrea. A stroll through the Vucceria market (market buffs should not miss the more flourishing Capo market behind the Opera House) brings you to the Kalsa, perhaps the most interesting part of the old city. Much of the city’s night life is here. My daughter recommends Pub ai Chiavettieri and Enoteca Cana.

Yet another option would be rustic simplicity in the shadow of the Zisa, the Norman pleasure palace. The B&B Baglio alla Zisa is a bit of a walk from the centre but on your way you’ll pass Trattoria ai Cascinari, a local favourite for authentic Sicilian food.

Mary Taylor Simeti is the author of ‘Pomp and Sustenance: Twenty-Five Centuries of Sicilian Food’ (published in the UK as ‘Sicilian Food: Recipes from Italy’s Abundant Isle’)

Hotel Villa Igiea,
tel: +39 091-631 211

Bar Alba, Piazza Don Bosco

Trattoria Da Giovanni,
Via Mondello 52,
tel: +39 091-6840 623

Hotel Principe di Villafranca,
tel: +39 091-6118 523

Trattoria Piccolo Napoli, Piazzetta Mulino a Vento, tel: +39 091-320 431

BB22, tel: +39 091-611 610

Ristorante Sant’Andrea, Piazzetta Sant’Andrea,
tel: +39 091-334 999

Baglio alla Zisa,
tel: +39 091-6524 931

Trattoria ai Cascinari,
via D’Ossuna 43-45,
tel: +39 091-6519 804

Palermo did not really rise to prominence until AD830, when it fell to the Arabs of north Africa. Whereas the Byzantines had governed from Syracuse, these new arrivals instantly saw the strategic value of that superb harbour and made it their capital. By now its population was probably about 300,000 – mostly Arabs and Greeks but also with a substantial Jewish community. By the end of the century it was said that there were no fewer than 800 minarets rising above the roofs of the city.

The Arabs remained in control until the coming of the Normans. They first invaded the island from Calabria in 1061 but it was not till 1072 that they took Palermo, keeping it as their capital. It was from there that their first rulers, the Great Count Roger de Hauteville and his son King Roger II, moulded the most opulent and sumptuous kingdom of the middle ages, combining as never before or since the three great civilisations of the Mediterranean – Latin, Greek and Arab – in harmony and concord. And it is the monuments left by that kingdom that are the city’s greatest glory. Its old Royal Palace still stands, containing the Palatine Chapel that Roger II built in the 1140s on the upper floor, and which, almost unbelievably, succeeds in translating the political achievement into visual terms.

Its form is that of a western basilica, with a central nave and two side aisles, separated by antique granite columns, all with richly gilded Corinthian capitals, drawing the eye along to the five steps that lead up to the choir. Western, too, though whispering of the south, are the richly ornamented pavements, with the golden and coloured mosaic inlays of the steps, balustrades and lower walls – to say nothing of that proudest of pulpits, studded with gold and malachite, flanked by a 15ft carved paschal candlestick in white marble. But if we look to the wall mosaics, with which the whole chapel glows gold, we come once again face to face with Byzantium. King Roger could afford the best and he got it. Here are works of which the finest church in Constantinople would have been proud.

These almost antiphonal responses of Latin and Byzantine influences, set in so lavish a frame, would alone have earned for the Palatine Chapel a unique place among the religious buildings of the world. But for Roger, they were still not enough. What of the Saracens, the most populous of all his island subjects, whose loyalty to his father and himself had been unwavering for more than half a century? And so the chapel was given the most unexpected covering of any Christian church on earth – a purely Islamic stalactite ceiling of wood, as fine as anything to be found in Cairo or Damascus, intricately decorated with the earliest dateable group of Arabic paintings in existence anywhere. And figurative paintings at that.

You may have to plead a little before being allowed up to the floor above to see what is known, somewhat irritatingly, as the Sala di Ruggero. In fact, it is nothing of the kind, being the work of Roger’s son William. It is a small room, its vault and upper walls sumptuously encrusted with mosaics – but this time they are decorative rather than devotional: scenes of the countryside, Byzantine in their formal symmetry but Sicilian in their joyful portrayal of palms and orange-trees, leopards and peacocks, stags and centaurs, all radiant with a liveliness and humour that is wholly of the west.

From a chapel to a proper church: the Martorana, built by King Roger’s admiral, George of Antioch, and containing, among another series of glowing mosaics, the only surviving portrait of Roger himself. Dating from his own lifetime, it is almost certainly a likeness. There he stands, clothed as a Byzantine emperor, being crowned by Christ. “Rogerios Rex” runs the inscription above him, “Roger the King”. But the words are written in the Greek alphabet and this simple transliteration – particularly after one has spotted the Arabic inscription on an adjacent pillar – seems to diffuse the whole spirit of Norman Sicily.

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And so, we come to Monreale. In Norman days it was several hours’ ride from Palermo; today it is a suburb. The cathedral there was built by Roger’s grandson, William the Good, and finished in 1189. The whole point of it was to be its mosaics; William provided more than an acre and a half of uninterrupted wall space. The gigantic Christ Pantocrator in the central apse, his right hand alone more than 6ft high, cannot quite be classed with his counterpart along the coast at Cefalù but few works of art can. He is none the less sublime. Just below him stand a series of saints, among whom the second figure to the right of the central window is labelled “St Thomas Cantur”. Here is the earliest certain representation of St Thomas à Becket known to us, dating from less than a generation after his death. William’s queen, Joanna, was the daughter of Becket’s persecutor, Henry II of England; what better way was there of atoning for her father’s conduct than commemorating his victim on the walls of her husband’s cathedral?

We emerge into the loveliest cloister in the world, its pairs of slender columns inlaid with the same glorious Cosmati work in marble and mosaic (named after the Roman family involved with the craft) that is such a feature of the interior. Their capitals – a tour de force of romanesque stone-carving, unequalled in Sicily – include a representation in stone of William the Good presenting his new cathedral to Mary the Mother of God. The last and greatest religious foundation of Norman Sicily is offered and accepted.

Of the later monuments of Palermo, I would award the palm to the two little oratories decorated by Giacomo Serpotta. He lived from 1656 to 1732, and the virtuosity of his sculpture leaves one gasping. The church of San Lorenzo is Serpotta’s masterpiece. There is an extravaganza of putti , figures of human babies. The one most often reproduced is the figure of Charity, a smiling young woman offering her breast to a small child who reaches up to her while his trousers fall down.

My penultimate recommendation in Palermo is not for everybody. The catacombs of the convent of the Cappuccini were a favourite resting place for the bodies of well-to-do Palermitans from about 1600 to the end of the 19th century. Exposed in the bone-dry air of the catacombs, some 9,000 of them stand, sit or lie in row after row. The general impression is so hugely macabre that one comes out the other end as if off a ghost train in Disneyland.

Take the taste away with the traditional Sicilian puppet show. The stories are always the same: various medieval Christian knights smiting the infidel. And, my word, how they smite! There are echoes here of Charlemagne, and of Roland and Oliver at Roncesvalles, and of the Normans. The whole thing is energetic, noisy, deeply genuine and gloriously politically incorrect. All Sicily is here.

John Julius Norwich’s autobiography ‘Trying to Please’ is published by Dovecote Press

Read the FT’s review of ‘Byzantium, 330-1453’ at the Royal Academy