MONREALE (monte-reale, from a palace built by Roger I.), a town, Sicily, province of Palermo, 5m. inland from the city, on the slope of Monte Caputo, overlooking the valley "La Conca d'oro" (the Golden Shell), famed for its orange, olive and almond trees. Pop. (1931), 14,119 (town) ; 18,618 (commune).
A large Benedictine monastery, the church of which was the seat of the metropolitan archbishop of Sicily, was the greatest of all monuments of the Normans in northern Sicily. Begun in "74 by William II., in 1182 the church was dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and made a metropolitan cathe dral. The archiepiscopal palace and monastic buildings on the south were surrounded by a massive precinct wall, crowned at intervals by twelve towers. Little now remains except ruins of some of the towers, a great part of the monks' dormitory and frater, and the splendid cloister, completed about 1200.
The plan of the church is Lombardo-Norman. The basilican nave is wide, with narrow aisles. Monolithic columns of grey oriental granite (except one of cipollino), with Corinthian capitals, support eight pointed arches on each side much stilted. There is a high clerestory with wide two-light windows, with simple tracery like those in the nave-aisles and throughout the church. The other half, both wider and higher than the nave, is divided into a central space with two aisles, each of the divisions ending at the east with an apse. The roofs throughout are of open rich coloured woodwork very low in pitch. At the west end of the nave are two projecting towers, with a narthex-entrance between them. A large open atrium, which once existed at the west, has been replaced by a Renaissance portico. The exterior of the aisle walls and three eastern apses is decorated with intersecting pointed arches and other ornaments inlaid in marble. The outsides of the principal doorways and their pointed arches are magnificently carved and inlaid.
The enormous extent (7o,400 sq.ft.) and glittering splendour of the glass mosaics covering the interior are remarkable. With the exception of a high dado made of marble slabs with bands of mosaic between them, the whole interior surface of the walls is covered with minute mosaic-pictures in brilliant colours on a gold ground. The mosaic pictures are arranged in tiers, divided by horizontal and vertical bands (in parts of the choir as many as five tiers).
In the central apse at Monreale, behind the high altar, is a fine marble throne for the archbishop. On the north side, in front of the high altar, is a throne for the king. The tomb of William I., the founder's father, and the founder William II.'s tomb, erected in 1575, were both shattered by fire in 1811. On the north of the choir are the tombs of Margaret, wife of William I., and her two sons Roger and Henry, together with an urn containing the viscera of St. Louis of France. The pavement of the triple choir is a very magnificent specimen of marble and porphyry mosaic in opus alexandrinum.
Two bronze doors, north and west of the church, are divided into square panels with subjects and single figures, chiefly from Bible history, cast in relief. That on the north is by Barisanus of Trani. The cathedrals at Trani and Ravello also have bronze doors by him. The western door at Monreale, inferior to the northern one both in richness of design and in workmanship, is by Bonannus of Pisa, for the cathedral of which he cast the bronze door on the south. The one at Monreale is inscribed A.D. MCLXXXVII IND. III. BON ANNUS CIVIS PISANVS ME FECIT . The monastic library contains some valuable mss., especially a number of bilinguals in Greek and Arabic, the earliest dated See D. B. Gravina, Il Duomo di Monreale (Palermo, 1859-65).