around every corner

Wherever you turn in Palermo, the layered and chaotic capital of Sicily, secrets and stories await

- Stanley Stewart

the Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi occupies two sides of a piazza, as well as several adjoining streets, deep in the heart of the Kalsa quarter of Palermo.

When I rang the bell, a uniformed butler opened the colossal door and ushered me up a double staircase, past the stone bowls of water in which, had I been arriving at night sometime in the 18th century, I could have extinguished my torch. At the top, Principessa Carine Vanni Calvello Mantegna di Gangi was waiting to guide me around one of Italy's grandest palaces.

Palermo is a stage set, a theatrical concatenation of ornate façades and crumbling backstreets. The city could be the setting for a 1930s gangster thriller, a medieval fantasy with secret codes and evil monks, a bodice-ripping romance, or a contemporary film noir. But for all of its intricate cloisters, chaotic markets, and grand sea terraces, Palermo's narratives are about characters more than scenery.

Around every corner you stumble into remarkable people. Visit Paris and you will meet no one, except possibly other tourists. Come to Palermo and your phone will immediately be full of your new Sicilian friends' numbers. The city makes you part of the story.

In the palazzo, the principessa, who seemed too young and chic for this antique place, led me through the Fencing Room, the Music Room, the Red Room, the Green Room, the Conversation Room, and the Suicide Room-named for a painting of Cleopatra clutching her asp. When I asked how many rooms there were, she shrugged: "If you know how many rooms there are, it is not really a palace." We carried on to the famous Galleria degli Specchi, or Gallery of Mirrors. It is the setting for the ballroom scene, which lasted 44 cinematic minutes, in the 1960s film adaptation of the great Sicilian novel The Leopard. Here Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale waltzed beneath a ceiling swarming with cherubs, with a growing sense that their old world was vanishing. The principessa felt the same.