3 Best Sights in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily

There is no general access to the 17th-century Benedictine convent of San Michele, currently inhabited by just four nuns, but if you ring the doorbell, the nuns will invite you into the lobby to buy the traditional cookies they make, including nutty muconetti, made of candied pumpkin and almonds. You place your money—and the nuns place your cookies—in a small revolving hatch originally designed so that unwanted babies could be left to the care of the nuns while maintaining the anonymity of the mother.

The city's Duomo was founded in 1093 by Sicily’s first Norman ruler, Roger I, who is depicted in relief above the main entrance on horseback trampling a turbanned Arab. It has an interior dominated by the huge marble tableau of the Transfiguration above the altar, revealed as if behind stucco curtains held back by cherubs, designed by the Palermitan Renaissance sculptor Antonello Gagini who is thought to have worked with Michelangelo in Rome. In the right transept is the fragment of a fresco of Christ Pantokrator dating back to the original Norman church and created by Greek Byzantine artists.

Opposite the Museo del Satiro Danzante, the exuberant Baroque Jesuit College, with its portal framed by hefty male caryatids, was once the center of the Catholic Inquisition in town during the 18th century, charged with rooting out and punishing anything they deemed to be heresy. In 1824, the Jesuits clashed with Sicily’s Bourbon rulers and were kicked out (probably missed by a few). Now, the space is undergoing renovations, and visitors can explore small exhibitions of artworks from the municipal archives. The damaged church of Sant’Ignazio next door is sometimes open; it's an evocative elliptical space, framed by red-gold sandstone and marble columns, and open to the sky. It is occasionally used for open-air concerts and exhibitions.