Lost in PALERMO

With its mix of grit and grandeur, the Sicilian capital has something interesting to offer wherever you wander

- Antonia Quirke

PART GREEK, PART Phoenician, part Roman, part Arab, the city of Palermo is strong stuff. Snugly spectacular 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 entirely different from its front or sides.

This has always struck me as impeccably 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 Hotel Villa Igiea, I noticed that someone had drilled holes through its ancient columns to fix an electric plug for a minibar. Momentarily I was outraged. 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 rubble like the innards of pillows, leaving 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 immaculate, gigantic heart graffitied on the wall opposite what was once an elegant bank. Beyond a stretch of myrtle hedges off the Via Squarcialupo, outside the Conservatorio di Musica Vincenzo Bellini, students sit on 17thcentury stone slabs, murmuring to one another, heads touching.