San Cataldo is small, red-domed and slightly absurd, which is exactly why people love it. Three bare crimson cupolas sit on top of a square stone block, squeezed onto Piazza Bellini beside the Martorana church and a bit of Roman-era wall, in the middle of Palermo's old centre. It was built in the 1150s for Maio of Bari, an admiral and chancellor under King William I, and then promptly left unfinished when Maio was murdered a few years later. The inside has never had its mosaics, so the floor is the decoration: an inlaid marble pavement worn soft by nine centuries of feet. It is plain, and it is calm, and after the baroque excess elsewhere in the city that matters.
The church is one of the Arab-Norman monuments the city has grouped under UNESCO, and the logic is easy to see. The cubic body and the domes echo Fatimid architecture, the blind arcades are Norman, the planning is Byzantine. A cosmopolitan court built this, and it made no effort to hide it.
Now the honest bit about riding here. Palermo is a city of roughly six hundred and fifty thousand, with scooters, double parking, one-way streets that change character block by block, and a restricted traffic zone through much of the centre. The cathedral and Quattro Canti are a short walk, and a motorbike is the right tool for the job: you can slide into a space a car would circle for forty minutes. Park outside the tightest streets, lock the bike properly, and walk. Fuel is no issue, there are stations on the ring roads and the coast road toward Mondello. Eat standing up if you can: arancine, panelle in a bun, sfincione from a bakery, a granita with a brioche if it is hot.
The ride on from here crosses the island to the Roman villa at Casale, a long day that begins in this tangle and ends in quiet farmland. Leave the city before the midday heat and before the school run, and you will be on open road within the hour.