Martorana Church in Palermo
The Church of Santa Maria dell'Ammiraglio , also known as la Martorana , owes its most common name to the presence of a female Benedictine monastery to which, in 1435, the king Alfonso "the Magnanimous" granted the church.
The church was built starting from 1143 at the behest of the Admiral of the Kingdom, Giorgio Antiocheno, as thanks for the help and protection granted to him by the Blessed Virgin. Despite the transformations carried out in the 16th and 17th centuries, of which the Baroque facade is the most evident example, this fascinating sacred building retains the original Arab-Norman style as demonstrates the square body surmounted by a hemispherical dome. The entrance to the church takes place through the elegant bell tower with a square base consisting of four orders, with the first two very square, dating back to the original construction, and the upper ones dating back to the fourteenth century, very openwork with mullioned windows and corner columns. > The interior of the church has magnificent Byzantine mosaics in the upper part of the walls, in the arches and in the dome, considered to be the oldest in Sicily. The central point of all the mosaic decoration is the image of Christ Pantocrator surrounded by archangels, apostles, saints and prophets. The cycle is completed by the mosaics with the Nativity of Jesus, the Transit of Mary, the Annunciation and the Presentation in the Temple. of the destruction of the portico, were moved to the lateral recesses of the entrance, where they can still be admired today.
The magnificent choir of the nuns, which replaces the original porticoed atrium built at the end of the sixteenth century by the will of the abbess Eleonora of Bologna, it was saved from nineteenth-century demolitions and houses works by the famous Flemish painter Guglielmo Borremans, Olivio Sozzi and Giuseppe Salerno. The polychrome flooring with mosaics and marble inlays is splendid.
Under the presbytery area there is the ancient crypt sepulchral of the nuns, from which through an underground walkway you could reach a belvedere over Palazzo Guggino Bordonaro , from where the nuns could enjoy the coveted view of the Cassaro.
