My humble house

Piazza Bellini and the 3 churches , Tuesday, Oct 6, 2026

zorahak

Today we went to Ballero Market and bought sea bream ( quite expensive) , chicken ( much cheaper ) ,vegetables & some grapes and smallish sharon fruit.

Jannet still not so well so she stayed in while we went to Piazza Bellini . Thank goodness, we are in a spacious apartment so that she has her own bedroom to sleep as much as she can .

A lovely building
Another lovely building
An old church. A few churches along the way while we were walking
Walking2x
Love all these balconies crammed with plants . In my condo block , owners extend their square space of balcony so they have no balcony ! What a dud !! I don’t understand this but I suspect they want to enlarge their sq footage or usable space .
The Arab Norman Church of Saint Mary dell Ammiraglio
The  Church again
Painted ceilings, this seems normal here to have painted ceilings
All of this are made up of tiny mosaics
You can see the tiny gold mosaics
Angels , all this depicting biblical scenes
The domes in the church
As can be seen from above

The golden mosaics in Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio (La Martorana) include biblical scenes, but they’re mixed with portraits of Christ, prophets, apostles, evangelists and saints. These mosaics were spectacular and a sight behold . I can appreciate the intricate tiny mosaics and the great workmanship that went into making the ceiling of mosaics .

The mosaics enlarged
A further shot of the same mosaics
The actual mosaic piece in all it’s glory .

It was impressive these goldy2x mosaics depicting scenes from the bible . However, what resonates with me was the mosaics on the floor . While everyone else was looking up to the ceilings , I was looking down at the floor hahaha.

Love the middle border. Thinking that would be nice to have as a border in a bathroom

I love the flooring , these mosaics are 12 th century and have withstood many shoes stepping on it. This church is one of the monuments that is considered under UNESCO World Heritage . The church in Italian is  La Martorana, where I am  literally surrounded by three visual languages at once:

Byzantine Christianity → gold mosaics and biblical imagery
Islamic/Mediterranean tradition → geometric patterns
Norman Sicily → the architectural setting that brought these traditions together.

And that’s why the church is so important to UNESCO: the building isn’t merely decorated beautifully; it is physical evidence of cultures meeting and influencing one another in  12th-century Sicily.

Ok , I got stop here because I got another 2 churches to blog on and I think I have reached church saturation ! Hahaha

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