The book about the Monreale Cathedral we purchased at the gift shop describes this as possibly the most beautiful cathedral in the world. Rachael and I have been fortunate enough to see many fine European cathedrals over the years, and we both agree with this. I would say that it was almost worth the visit to Sicily just to see this. The longer you look, and especially after reading a bit about its history, the more astonishing it becomes. One of a kind.
We were the first visitors to enter the cathedral this morning. For several wonderful minutes we had the space to ourselves.
From a distance, all of these scenes look like oil paintings; but each of them is a construction from many thousands of small tiles. It is dumbfounding to look closely at any of these and then step back to look at the apse at a whole - it's development is almost beyond imagination. This is a photo of loading the arc (the same scene as the photo above), from the book we purchased at the cathedral's gift shop. The intent here is to show better how fine-grained and intricate these mosaics are - my camera and filming situation weren't good enough to show this much detail.
