We wandered towards the bus stop on Independence Square for Monreale, found out that it was actually about 200m away from where it was marked and just before the bus arrived we remembered you needed to buy tickets from the tobacconist! Luckily there was one nearby so we spent our €2.80 and got tickets in time to pack ourselves onto the bus. Definitely standing room only! It took quite a while to reach Monreale and we could have probably walked there in the same time but it was an experience. We walked up the hill towards the cathedral and saw a small alley with the rear of the cathedral at the end so we headed there to look at that aspect before rejoining the main square and buying our tickets. €12 each covered the cathedral, terraces, museum and cloisters - rather a bargain. The cathedral was like the Pallatine Chapel but bigger. And sadly a lot darker. I don't know if it was because the day was overcast but the place was spectacular but also very dull, the colours didn't stand out as much as they could have. We walked around, being continually impressed by the skill and vision of the craftsmen involved in building the spectacular place. We didn't spend too long in the diocesan museum as it was mostly vestments and religious artifacts and we'd seen enough of that sort of gaudy excess before. Strange how I consider a cloak with gold thread as 'gaudy excess' but a building whose walls and roof are covered in gold is 'spectacular'! I guess one is made to glorify a man wheras the other is built to glorify a god. From the museum though you could access the roof walk which gave views over the cloisters and then after climbing some more stairs, over the Bay of Palermo and the city itself. The clouds did look very foreboding from up here! We returned to the cathedral and asked how we got to the cloisters, which turned out to be via a building in the square behind the cathedral.