We just spent too little time in Palermo, indeed in Sicily. It’s truly a place one must return to for as the great Goethe wrote “Without Sicily, Italy Creates No Image in the Soul: Here Is the Key to Everything”.

Indeed it is! What little time we had left in Palermo (for we had an New Year’s appointment at Syracuse to keep) we spent visiting one of its most characteristic churches: San Giovanni degli Eremiti.

The Normans, who established their reign in Sicily in 1072, destroyed the monuments, but not the tradition of the preceding Byzantine and Arab architecture.  San Giovanni degli Eremiti in Palermo, which dates from 1132, is Arab in the clear relationship between cubic spaces and hemispherical domes. Is it a Romanesque church with an oriental feel or is it an oriental mosque with a western feel?  The church is, in fact, built according to the canons of Sicilian-Norman architecture; it is a Romanesque church which externally resembles oriental buildings. If in Istanbul the Moslems took the Byzantine Santa Sofia as their model for their Blue Mosque then in Palermo the Normans took Arabic architecture as the model for their church. If only religions could collaborate as closely in their theology as in their architecture! May art always defeat war!

San Giovanni, characterized on the outside by red domes, leaning with one side against a front square body, is in the shape of a cross divided into square spans on each of which rests a hemisphere. The presbytery, ending in a niche, is surmounted by a dome, like that of the two quadrangular bodies that flank it and of which the one on the left raises to a bell tower.

The unroofed cloister, embellished by a luxuriant garden, is the best preserved part of the primitive monastery; the paired columns with acanthus leaf capitals supporting ogival arches stand out for their beauty and lightness.

Where are we I wondered as I walked through this enchanted corner?  The earthly paradise, the faith we hold inwardly, may perhaps be created when two great religions like those of Christianity and Muslim faith unite in celebration of the transcendence of God. They certainly can do this in architecture. May we hope that they do this in the horribly divided world of today?