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 MONREALE (contraction of monte-reale, so called from a palace built here by Roger I.), a town of Sicily, in the province of Palermo, 5 m. inland (W.S.W.) from it, on the slope of Monte Caputo, overlooking the beautiful and very fertile valley called “La Conca d’oro” (the Golden Shell), famed for its orange, olive and almond trees, the produce of which is exported in large quantities. Pop. (1901), 17,379 (town), 23,556 (commune). The town, which for long was a mere village, owed its origin to the founding of a large Benedictine monastery, with its church, the seat of the metropolitan archbishop of Sicily. This, the greatest of all the monuments of the wealth and artistic taste of the Norman kings in northern Sicily, was begun about 1170 by William II., and in 1182 the church, dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, was, by a bull of Pope Lucius III., elevated to the rank of a metropolitan cathedral.

The archiepiscopal palace and monastic buildings on the south side were of great size and magnificence, and were surrounded by a massive precinct wall, crowned at intervals by twelve towers. This has been mostly rebuilt, and but 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. This last is well preserved, and is one of the finest cloisters both for size and beauty of detail now extant. It is about 170 ft. square, with pointed arches decorated with diaper work, supported on pairs of columns in white marble, 216 in all, which were alternately plain and decorated by bands of patterns in gold and colours, made of glass tesserae, arranged either spirally or vertically from end to end of each shaft. The marble caps are each richly carved with figures and foliage executed with great skill and wonderful fertility of invention—no two being alike. At one angle, a square pillared projection contains the marble fountain or monks' lavatory, evidently the work of Moslem sculptors.

 MONRO, DAVID BINNING (1836–1905), English Homeric scholar, was born in Edinburgh on the 16th of November 1836. He was a grandson of Alexander Monro, tertius (1773–1859), professor of anatomy in Edinburgh University, whose father, Alexander Monro, secundus (1733–1817), and grandfather, Alexander Monro, primus (1697–1767), both filled the same position. He was educated at Glasgow University, and Brasenose and Balliol Colleges, Oxford. In 1859 he was elected fellow, and in 1882 provost of Oriel, which office he held till his death at Heiden, Switzerland, on the 22nd of August 1905. He was a man of varied attainments, an excellent linguist, and possessed considerable knowledge of music, painting and architecture. His favourite study was Homer, and his Grammar of the Homeric Dialect (2nd ed., 1891) established his reputation as an authority on that author. He also edited the last twelve books of the Odyssey, with valuable appendices on the composition of the poem, its relation to the Iliad and the cyclic poets, the history of the text, the dialects, and the Homeric house; a critical text of the poems and fragments (Homeri opera et reliquiae, 1896); Homeri opera, (1902, with T. W. Allen, in Scriptorum classicorum bibliotheca oxoniensis); and an edition of the Iliad with notes for schools. His article on Homer, written for the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was revised by him for this work before he died. Mention may also be made of his Modes of Ancient Greek Music (1894), on which see Classical Review for December 1894, with author’s reply in the same for February 1895.

 MONROE, JAMES (1758–1831), fifth president of the United States, was born on Monroe’s creek, a tributary of the Potomac