Things to do in Palermo

Landmark · Albergheria

The seat of the Sicilian parliament, with a twelfth-century royal chapel inside that fuses Norman architecture, Byzantine mosaic and an Islamic muqarnas ceiling.

Local tip: The chapel closes to visitors when the Assemblea Regionale is sitting, so check before you go. Go early: the mosaics need the low morning light coming through the south windows, and the tour groups arrive after ten.

Food · Albergheria, Capo, Vucciria

Three street markets with a thousand years of continuity behind their layout, each with a different character and a different half of the day.

Local tip: Ballarò is the working food market and is at its best before noon. Vucciria has largely become a night-drinking quarter rather than a market. Capo is the compromise — real produce, and open later than Ballarò.

Nature · 11km north-west of the centre

A crescent of white sand between two limestone headlands, with a Liberty-style bathing pavilion on stilts in the middle of the bay.

Local tip: Buses 806 and the summer services get gridlocked; the sea is best on a weekday morning. The comune has introduced an evening ZTL over the borgata from 20:00 to midnight, extended to 01:00 on the eve of holidays, so plan not to drive in for dinner.

Culture · Piazza Verdi

The largest opera house in Italy and the third largest in Europe, closed for twenty-three years and reopened in 1997.

Local tip: The under-30 and student tickets are startlingly cheap and released close to the performance. The daytime guided tour gets you onto the stage and up to the roof terrace, which is the best free-ish view of the old city.

Culture · Cuba / Calatafimi

Eight thousand mummified Palermitans in corridors under a Capuchin monastery, arranged by profession and social rank.

Local tip: It is genuinely unsettling rather than kitsch, and photography is prohibited. Pair it with a walk up to the Zisa — the twelfth-century Norman-Arab summer palace ten minutes away — which almost nobody visits and which explains the city better than anything else.

Neighborhood · In a hollow behind the Palazzo Reale

A small quarter sunk in a depression a few hundred metres from the cathedral, invisible from the streets around it and rebuilt around a community farm, a circus school and a set of murals.

Local tip: One of the clearest examples anywhere in Italy of a neighbourhood organising its own regeneration. Go on a Sunday morning when the farm and the borgata are busy, and go with someone who lives there if you can.