the same
ascendency of Arab culture. San Giovanni degli Eremiti, with its low
white rounded domes, is nothing more or less than a little mosque
adapted to the rites of Christians.[1] The country palaces of the
Zisa and the Cuba, built by the two Williams, retain their ancient
Moorish character. Standing beneath the fretted arches of the hall
of the Zisa, through which a fountain flows within a margin of
carved marble, and looking on the landscape from its open porch, we
only need to reconstruct in fancy the green gardens and
orange-groves, where fair-haired Normans whiled away their hours
among black-eyed odalisques and graceful singing boys from Persia.
Amid a wild tangle of olive and lemon trees overgrown with scarlet
passion-flowers, the pavilion of the Cubola, built of hewn stone and
open at each of its four sides, still stands much as it stood when
William II. paced through flowers from his palace of the Cuba, to
enjoy the freshness of the evening by the side of its fountain. The
views from all these Saracenic villas over the fruitful valley of
the Golden Horn, and the turrets of Palermo, and the mountains and
the distant sea, are ineffably delightful. When the palaces were
new--when the gilding and the frescoes still shone upon their
honeycombed ceilings, when their mosaics glittered in noonday
twilight, and their amber-coloured masonry was set in shade of pines
and palms, and the cool sound of rivulets made music in their courts
and gardens, they must have well deserved their Arab titles of
'Sweet Waters' and 'The Glory' and 'The Paradise of Earth.'

[1] Tradition asserts that the tocsin of this church gave
the signal in Palermo to the massacre of the Sicilian
Vespers.

But the true splendour of Palermo, that which makes this city one of
the most glorious of the south, is to be sought in its churches--in
the mosaics of the Cappella Palatina founded by King Roger, in the
vast aisles and cloisters of Monreale built by King William the Good
at the instance of his Chancellor Matteo,[1] in the Cathedral of
Palermo begun by Offamilio, and in the Martorana dedicated by George
the Admiral. These triumphs of ecclesiastical architecture, none the
less splendid because they cannot be reduced to rule or assigned to
any single style, were the work of Saracen builders assisted by
Byzantine, Italian, and Norman craftsmen. The genius of Latin
Christianity determined the basilica shape of the Cathedral of
Monreale