SICILY: PALERMO'S ROYAL PALACE AND PALATINE CHAPEL

 March 17, 2024

We set off for Palermo around 9:00 AM in our very cramped VW Golf. 

It was supposed to be a 2.5 hour drive, but we put the wrong destination in our phone's maps app, and we ended up off track. We lost about 40 minutes, but we still made it on time to our first destination of the day, the Royal Palace of Palermo, where we had timed-entry tickets to the Palatine Chapel.

The Palatine Chapel is inside the Royal Palace (aka Norman Palace of Palermo), which was the home of the Sicilian kings and/or seat of the government until 1946. Since then it has been the seat of the Sicilian Regional Assembly. It is the oldest royal residence in all of Europe and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The palace dates back to the 9th century, although it had a major makeover in the 12th century. The oldest part of the current structure is on the right end, below.

Roger II of Sicily, also known as Roger the Norman, was the first king of Sicily from 1130 until 1154 and is considered the founder of the Kingdom of Sicily, unifying the Norman conquests in southern Italy, Sicily, and Malta under his rule. He was known for practicing tolerance for the variety of ethnicities and cultures that lived in his realm. An interesting fact about Roger II: He married three times and had nine legitimate children and at least five known illegitimate children.

One of his longest-lasting accomplishments was the building of a spectacular chapel inside the above palace. It was the primary reason we were hurrying to Palermo. 

The Palatine Chapel (or Cappella Palatina in Italian) is perhaps the most beautiful single room I have entered anywhere in the world. Commissioned by Roger II in 1132, it took eight years to build and is a unique blend of Norman, Byzantine, classical, and Arab architecture. 

The door to the inside of the chapel is rather inconspicuous compared to the ornate colonnade that surrounds the inner courtyard of the palace. 

The wooden beams of the ceiling, brick arches, and Corinthian columns are beautiful, but what really distinguishes the entrance and the interior are the mosaics.

PORTUGAL: SANCTUARY OF OUR LADY OF NAZARE AND DOS VENTOS RESTAURANT

June 26, 2022

There is a story that in the 4th century a small wooden statue of the Virgin Mary was brought from the city of Nazareth in the Holy Land to a monastery in Spain, and then in 711 it was brought to the Portuguese seaside by a monk and the current king of Portugal. They promptly became hermits, moving into a small grotto in the cliffs above the sea. When the monk died, the king left the Madonna statue on an altar in the grotto.

Flash forward 400+ years. As mentioned in my previous post, sometime in the 12th century a local official was chasing a deer during a hunt in the fog, and he chased the deer over a cliff near the grotto. Just as the hunter's horse was about to follow the deer, the hunter called out to the Virgin to save him, and, miraculously, his horse stopped abruptly on the very verge of a death drop. 

To honor this miraculous intervention by the Virgin Mary, a chapel was built over the grotto in 1182.  A bigger church that could accommodate more visitors to the Virgin was built in 1377 by King Fernando I, and it was remodeled multiple times between the 16th and 19th centuries. Today, this beautiful baroque Sanctuary of Our Lady of Nazaré still houses the miraculous statue. The name Nazaré (pronounced Na-zuh-RAY) is the Portuguese version of Nazareth, the city in the Holy Land from where the statue came.

Unfortunately, when we were there the statue itself was out for repair and restoration, but there was still a lot to enjoy in the rest of the church.

POLAND: CZĘSTOCHOWA

June 25, 2019

We were picked up at our hotel at abut 8:00 AM for a 2 1/2 hour drive to Częstochowa, home of Poland's most famous icon, the Black Madonna.

The icon is housed in a chapel within the basilica anchoring the Jasna Gora Monastery, which was founded in 1382 by Pauline monks from Hungary. Because of her presence in the monastery, Częstochowa is the third largest Catholic pilgrimage site in the world.

A 350-foot-tall bell tower dominates the approach.

"Totus tuus" is Latin for "All yours." Pope John Paul II's motto was "All yours, Mary!"

Side chapels protrude from the side of the basilica.

We were herded into a waiting room where we were assigned to a group of four other English-speaking tourists and to Father Foster Muir, one of the Pauline monks. He was Scottish and had a delightful accent. We found him to be very knowledgeable and often quite funny. He pointed out that we were lucky not to have come on a day like the one shown in this photograph that was hanging on the wall. That's a lot of people. Father Muir said that many poles walk to Częstochowa from Warsaw or Krakow, the two cities Częstochowa lies more or less half-way between. (Krakow is about 92 miles away, and Warsaw is about 135 miles away.) It is typically a nine-day journey.