The temple at Segesta served as a good introduction to Doric temples.  Because it is unfinished, it lacks ornament and refinement, such as a friezes and fluting, that might distract from the essentials of its construction.  Regarding its unfinished nature, it is entirely likely that the people of Egesta began building this monument to impress the Athenians who were coming to assess their assets, and then stopped as soon as the trick had been completed.  It was just so cool to see the effects of what we were reading in class over two-thousand years after the events documented by Thucydides.

           Back to why this temple is such a good template, the monument displays all of the characteristic features of the Doric style of the day, in which all of the temples we saw were built.  It is six columns wide by 14 long, almost the desired proportions, which are an even number of columns wide (x) by 2x+1 long.  These refined proportions and smaller echini help to date it to later in classical Sicily, around 420 BC.  It still has pieces of stone jutting out of the base (the crepidoma) that would have been used to lift and transport the pieces.

           Also, one of the things I found most interesting about this temple was that its base was not flat.  In fact, it was far from flat.  Counterintuitively, this was done in order to give the structure a normal appearance on the hill.  This tendency to distort proportions in order to make this look proportional extends to the spacing between the columns and the entasis of the columns themselves.  This irregularity is in fact fairly normal for these temples.

On our second day in Palermo, the group visited the Cappella Palatina, a Norman chapel built in the 12th century under Roger II.  The chapel combines Norman, Byzantine, and Arab traditions in its architecture under the roof of Christianity.  First of all, the main architectural elements are Norman.  The Byzantine features are the mosaic style and triple-apsidal plan.  Muslim influence most obviously presents itself in the muqarnas on the ceiling and the abundance of geometric designs.  Additionally, there are inscriptions not only in the traditional Latin and Greek, but in Arabic, as well. La Zisa, which we toured the day before, is yet another Norman structure in Sicily with strong Arabic influence.  There are plenty of geometric designs and and Arabic inscriptions (mostly on the bowls inside) in La Zisa.  Also, its muqarnas is made in brick instead of wood, revealing that the Normans made the traditionally Islamic feature their own.  However, the muqarnas of the Cappella Palatina separates itself again from that of La Zisa in that it was painted with figures, obviously straying far from Islamic tradition.

The last interesting thing that I will point out about the Cappella Palatina are the columns.  Not only are such Corinthian columns uncommon in Norman architecture, but it is interesting that original classical columns are integrated into the arches.  The Cappella Palatina is quite literally a combination of the cultures present in Sicily.

On the first night in Sicily, we all sat down to una opera dei pupi in Palermo.  Though technically an amusement for children (we all know that kid in the front row was getting really into it), the show we watched provided some valuable insight into the uniquely complex culture of Sicily.  The factions of “paladins” and “infidels” pitted against each other, as they are traditionally in the Carolingian cycle, reveal the extent to which some of the more recent cultural influences are the most prevalent.  Though the Arabs took hold of Sicily as early as the 9th century CE and held it for nearly two centuries, the French (of which nationality the paladins are supposed to be) never had a stake in the island.  This goes to show that the Christian influence from groups whose presence we saw, such as in the Norman Cappella Palatina and the Spanish inquisitor’s building, was strong enough to make the island associate more closely to a people that were never there than those who once were.  Although La Zisa, which we saw earlier that day, shows a clear integration of the artistic traditions of the two faiths nearly a millennium ago, this cooperation does not seem to have lasted.  We can confirm that, at least in recent history (since the pupi rose to popularity in the 19th century, which is recent for us classicists), there has been a negative attitude toward Islam in Sicily, or at least one strong enough to sustain the tradition of pupi.