Palermo

It sits on the first floor of the Norman palace, Byzantine mosaic on the walls and an Arab honeycomb of wood overhead. Craftsmen of three faiths overlap in one room, so you look up and down by turns. On days the assembly sits, parts of it close.

It is half an hour by bus up the hill out of the city. The mosaics inside take the attention, but the two hundred and twenty-eight columns of the cloister repeat no pattern, and many stay longer there. The cloister is a separate ticket.

The friars dried the bodies, dressed them and stood them along the walls. They run into the thousands. Corridors divide by clergy, professionals, women and children, so rank became the floor plan. The two-year-old laid in last still has nearly her whole face.

From morning into the afternoon the lanes vanish under stalls and traders chant to pull customers over. It dates from the Arab period and so, they say, does the name, with fry stalls mixed among the fish and vegetables. Go late and they are packing up.

The four corners of a crossroads were cut back into concave baroque fronts to make something like a square. Each front stacks a season, a Spanish king and one of the city's patron saints, and as the hours pass the sun moves from one face to the next.

It ranks among the largest opera houses in Italy and reopened in 1997 after two decades with the doors shut. The last scene of the third Godfather film was shot on these steps. In the afternoon, when the stage is dark, a guide walks you through it.

Arab craftsmen built this summer palace for a Norman king, and its name is Arabic too. A passage was cut through the middle with water running along it, so moving air cooled the rooms without machinery. It now holds a collection of Islamic art.

A crescent of white sand that one bus reaches straight from the city. A timber pavilion in Liberty style stands out on the water where the walkway ends and works as a restaurant now, and on summer weekends no room is left on the sand.

A rock mountain standing over Palermo to the north, with a shrine built into a cave on its flank. In July the festival for the city's own saint runs several days and a procession climbs it at night. The old pilgrim path takes roughly two hours on foot.

A botanical garden over two centuries old where tropical trees grow outdoors in the Sicilian climate. One Australian fig has dropped roots from its branches until the single tree spreads like a wood, and so few people come that the benches stay empty.

Arab, Norman, Gothic and baroque piled into one cathedral, with the red porphyry tomb of Frederick II inside. With a rooftop ticket you can stroll the terraces and look out between the domes over the city to the mountains.

An old market winding through the lanes behind the cathedral, with fish, vegetable and spice stalls spilling up to shuttered shopfronts. Fewer tourists than Ballaro, and more neighbourhood shopping. Morning is when the stalls are fullest.

A twelfth-century Norman church capped by five red domes, bare stone inside. The real draw is the small cloister garden beside it, where the red domes rise above lemon trees and palms. The royal palace is just up the road.

A church founded in 1143 by the Norman king's admiral, with a Byzantine mosaic of Christ crowning Roger II. It shares a square with the red-domed San Cataldo next door. The almond sweets of the old convent took their name from this church.

A fifteenth-century Gothic mansion holding Sicilian painting and sculpture. The Triumph of Death, a vast fresco of Death on a skeletal horse shooting arrows into the crowd, fills an entire room. Antonello da Messina's Virgin Annunciate is here too.

A large sixteenth-century fountain carved in Florence and shipped over, ringed with nude gods and nymphs. Nuns in the convent next door were said to be scandalised, so it is nicknamed the Fountain of Shame. It faces the town hall and is floodlit after dark.

A seaside town about 1 hour east of Palermo by train, known for the gold Christ mosaic in its Norman cathedral, begun in 1131. A path climbs the great rock behind the town, and a sand beach spreads out in front of it.