Reader’s Digest
100 february 2020
P
art Greek, part Phoeni-
cian, part Roman, part
Arab, the city of Palermo is
strong stuff. Snugly spec-
tacular in its bay setting at
the foot of Sicily’s Monte
Pellegrino, it looks, as a garibaldino*
approaching it from the sea once said,
like a city imagined by a poetic child.
Colourful relics of Arab domination
mix with the Norman and Baroque, so
the back of a building might look en-
tirely different from its front or sides.
This has always struck me as impec-
cably gallant: an acceptance of this,
a pragmatic incorporation of that.
Beauty, rot and salvage. Renaissance
palaces next to hovels, more than
100 churches and oratories and the
domed roofs of one-time mosques—
all reminders of countless invaders.
Sunbathing one afternoon in the
roofless remains of a Greek temple
that sits by the pool at the Grand Ho-
tel Villa Igiea, I noticed that someone
had drilled holes through its ancient
columns to fix an electric plug for
a minibar. Momentarily I was out-
raged. But as a cloud of cabbage
whites [a type of butterfly] idled past
an American supine on his lounger,
time thickened with that drugging
Sicilian intensity that comes on as
though gigantic pyres have been lit on
the surrounding hills, and I lost track
of my indignation.In the hot months, you notice the
city’s rampant dereliction more.
Streets and squares in the historic
centre, still shattered from the 1943
bombardments, unpack their rub-
ble like the innards of pillows, lea-
ving little trails even into the famous
La Vucciria market with its stalls
selling multicoloured Slinkies and
pigs’ trotters.
In the collapsed Piazza Garraffello
you’ll find an anatomically immacu-
late, gigantic heart graffitied on the
wall opposite what was once an ele-
gant bank. Beyond a stretch of myr-
tle hedges off the Via Squarcialupo,
outside the Conservatorio di Musica
Vincenzo Bellini, students sit on 17th-
century stone slabs, murmuring to
one another, heads touching.
Where am I now? I’m lost. There
may be a lovely simplicity to the
old city’s layout—two straight roads
dividing everything into four quar-
ters—but my three maps each tell me
something different, especially when
the streets condense in the south-
eastern Albergheria quarter into
alleys where teenage boys race their
boxer dogs alongside pimped-up
scooters. Here I saw a man leading
a harness-free, sun-tired horse into
a dim Moorish courtyard, his fingers
scratching its nose.
Horses are everywhere in Palermo.
On the motorways in the early hours
of the morning they are raced illegally,
the survivors left to gently plod tou-
rists in comfy little traps to and from*A follower of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the mid-
19th century Italian general and nationalist photos:^ (top)©shutterstock.^ (
bottom)^ courtesy^ of^ thegrandhotelvilla^ igiea