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A stunning old mosque that was once home to a wolf-taming hermit is hidden behind medieval walls in a busy neighborhood of Palermo.
Though Roger I, known as the Great Count, destroyed the rule of the Emirs in Sicily, he didn’t do the same to the island’s Muslim inhabitants. They were tolerated (albeit in a subjugated status) in the 120 or so years of Norman rule of Sicily. Likewise, the artistic and architectural heritage of Muslim Sicily wasn’t entirely destroyed upon the arrival of the Normans, but rather it was incorporated, along with that of the island’s other major group, Byzantine Greeks, into a stylistic fusion today known as the Arab-Norman style.
