The story of Palermo Cathedral

Find the first column on the left of the south porch and look closely: a verse of the Qur'an is carved into it. That column belonged to an earlier Byzantine basilica that the Arabs turned into a mosque after conquering the city in the 9th century. In 1185 the Norman archbishop Walter Ophamil built the present cathedral on the site, and he still lies in a sarcophagus in its crypt.

Centuries of additions followed, from Gothic towers to the neoclassical look given between 1781 and 1801, with Ferdinando Fuga's great dome. Inside, in the right aisle, rest Roger II, the first King of Sicily, his daughter Constance, Emperor Henry VI and Frederick II, in porphyry tombs. The silver urn of Saint Rosalia, patron of Palermo, is here too.

And on the floor runs a bronze meridian line, built in 1801 by the astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi, where a beam of sun marks solar noon.