Palermo

Hi. Hi hello, hi. Welcome. It's been... a minute.

Lots of stuff afoot as usual (the swirl of trying to get some work done, a series of days in the upper 90s and low 100s, an unexpected film festival and some personal adventures here in Bologna) that has me once more falling behind in updating this account of What Exactly Have I been Up To, to the degree that we gotta go alllll the way back a month to my arrival in: Palermo! Which, not to give anything away, might be my favorite city on this trip, and very possibly my favorite city in Italy. (Don't like it? Write me a grant to revisit your faves and retabulate! I'll be very rigorous!) After the jump: um, why?

SO: Palermo! What's the deal? Well, a few things.

First, it is a concentration of everything I found most alluring and absorbing about Sicily, which really does feel like its own thing a half-step away from "Italy" (whatever that is... insert long discursive aside about the recency of Italian unification, hyper-regionalism, and dialects bordering on their own languages). Most specifically, that's to do with the syncretism of the place: as you probably know if you've read about or visited Sicily, this is one of the more-conquered spots in the Mediterranean, and traces of each culture very much remains. Archaeologically, culinarily, aesthetically, behaviorally, you get this woozy dreamlike interplay of Arab, Byzantine, Norman, Roman, Greek, Spanish, and Bourbon influence. Each culture left a trace somewhere - most famously, perhaps, in the churches where you can see the exact spot on the floor where a Byzantine mosaic chapel gives way to a marble Norman expansion, next to a pillar with classically Arabic geometric patterning.

This fella is fed up with all these Johnny come lately with their marble-inlay fads

(A quick aside while I'm thinking of it: the famous dictum we've all vaguely been taught that Islam forbids pictorial depiction, leading to a glorious history of intricate pattern-making and abstraction in lieu of portraiture, doesn't really hold up to most collections of Islamic art, including those at the Louvre and the Benaki Museum of Islamic Art in Athens. As with most ancient religions, it remains fascinating how long it took for the "core" and "essential" rules to codify out of a much more heterodox tradition.)

ANYWAY AS I SAID Sicily, and Palermo even more so, is marked by its many previous conquerors, and in Palermo you also feel the bella chaos that you get in the south of Italy. (Yes, it's a generalization, but now that I'm in Bologna - by no means a Germanic stuffy enclave - I'm really feeling the more organized and, at times, sleepy vibes!) This kicked off on my arrival: I arrived to my hotel, was checked in at the front desk, where the manager proceeded to walk me up the stairs, hollering for Lucia repeatedly, eventually opening the door to my room, looking in, immediately slamming it, turning to me, announcing "CHANGE-A ROOM," and walking me down the hall to a larger suite for reasons that are still opaque to me.

I loved this fountain's play of reflected light but also it's a clever transition to the next paragraph you'll see YOU'LL ALL SEE

There are few places that are better to practice being water, or more rewarding of the effort. I may have written about this here before, but I adore the traffic pattern of Palermo, where the rule of thumb is that everybody has an eye on everybody else and does what they like. I'd never want to drive there (I never want to drive anywhere) but it's a city where cars still feel like recent arrivals who have to constantly reckon with each other and with pedestrians. As a result, there's a perpetual negotiation, which I love - I described it to theatre friends as like running Viewpoints exercises with traffic, and it's no exaggeration to say that I felt safer here and in Naples than I do in most parts of America.

I MEAN COME ON GENUINELY HOW CAN YOU NOT WANT TO LIVE IN A CITY WHERE YOU SEE DELIVERIES LIKE THIS GOING DOWN

 

The other thing I love about the city's design? Is you have a great historical investment in managing heat, baby! I gather from a conversation that this is also something from the Muslim era of Sicily, but in the historical center most of the streets are oriented with the specific goal of catching offshore breezes and whooshing them through town for cooling effect. Whether that's aerodynamically sound or not I have no idea, but what is apparent is that streets here are almost all human-scaled (again: not widened in preference to cars, but making them get in line behind humans) and they tend to undulate in a way that I only gradually realized meant you almost always had a shady pathway available to you. That warren of streets stressed out a number of folk I have chatted with since my time in Palermo, but again, the human scale (and the merciful shadiness of it all) won me over.

Palermo was also surprisingly green to me - not entirely, and certainly it has its broader-avenue stretches where you feel the heat rising from the asphalt, but like many places in southern Italy and Sicily, you're never very far from a cluster of trees, and Palermo felt like it also had the Arabic legacy of courtyard gardens in spades. This found its richest expression in my last day there, ambling around the magnificent botanical gardens and even finding corners where the city sounds utterly faded and I was able to tap into that forest bathing serenity that I so adore.

You thought this was gonna be a picture of nature, THINK AGAIN idiot! Like I'm not gonna share a marionette museum photo when I get the chance, what do you take me for.

 

There's a lot of Palermo I didn't get to explore. I visited the markets, but this short stay and my hotel digs meant I didn't get in a market routine as I like to in my favorite Italian stops. There are a few utterly-non-touristy corners of the city that I passed through on my way back from Monreale and on my way to an Italian-dubbed screening of Top Gun Maverick (what can I say, I like watching dumb action movies in foreign languages when I'm on the road), and my timing meant I was there after most of the performing arts season had wound down. I didn't tap into the modern or contemporary art spaces that fleck the city core, though I did very much love the street art - only Bologna has appealed to me as much on that front as Palermo and Catania, and it's surprisingly confined to a few corners here. I'm eager to get back to Palermo - it's absolutely on my list of "maybe a month here?" stays, although - again, it's 100 degrees in Bologna today - maybe more for late-spring than midsummer.

I also visited the cathedral at Monreale, which truly is remarkable, and which reminded me once again that I need to remember I hate heights before I am outdoors at the top of a huge dang cathedral.

Look, Palermo isn't for everybody (I met somebody who infinitely preferred Catania, which I can understand if you didn't start and end every day walking through an overheated fish market underpass, and a number of folk who found it stressful in ways I absolutely did not). I felt more about Naples the way some people seem to feel about this city, so maybe I caught it on a good day, met the right people, and just lucked out across the board. It happens! But as of this writing, if you were to tell me I had to uproot and plant for my last few working decades in any Italian city, I'd have to give this place very serious consideration. I cannot wait to return.

HAVE I PERHAPS MENTIONED THE GOODNESS OF THE PLACE. IT IS SO.