Rome and Palermo, Wednesday, May 1
Getting to Palermo was a snap: cab to the airport, pretty comfortable ride on ITA, maniac cabbie from the Palermo airport, and before we knew it we were being shown around the same apartment we’d stayed in in September inside the Palazzo Ajutamicristo.
Even though we had a nice dinner ahead of us, it was after 3 before we left the apartment, and were feeling a bit peckish. As an introduction to the neighborhood we headed to the Antica Foccaceria San Francesco in front of the gothic church of, you guessed it, San Francesco. We had a sampling of Sicilian appetizers: a huge, delicious octopus salad for Vladimir, arancini for Sue, a ricotta dish for Connie, and caciocavallo all’ argentiera for me (one of Montalbano’s favorite dishes: melted cheese in a sweet and sour sauce). All terrific, and washed down with an Etna Bianco from Alta Mora.
San Francesco d’Assisi (1255-57) is certainly the most beautiful gothic church in Palermo.
The interior has been left largely untouched, mercifully.
We then took an orienting stroll, passing through our neighborhood and onto the Corso. We tried walking toward the newer parts of town along Via Maqueda, but it was a holiday (May 1) and the streets were packed with participants in the passeggiata, so we retreated to our apartment.
Our walk to dinner was interesting: as we approached the large, grassed over Piazza Magione, we noticed increasing numbers of young people drinking on the street, and we heard music and the roar of a large crowd. The May Day festivities in the piazza had drawn thousands of young people, and we could barely move through the crowd.
Luckily, our table at Quattro Mani, a wonderful seafood restaurant we had visited last year, was inside and very quiet.
Sue and I shared a superb dish of marinated red shrimp on an avocado cream. Here follows an excursus on the red shrimp. The history of Mazara del Vallo’s red prawn is closely linked to the maritime tradition of the city, a little less than two hundred kilometers away from the coasts of Tunisia. Mazara boasts the largest fishing fleet in Italy and the second largest in Europe. The spearhead of Sicilian delicacies, the Mazara red prawn, ammaru russu in Sicilian, is mainly fished in the Mediterranean waters, south of Mazara, around Lampedusa and Malta, south of Pantelleria or further East, between Cyprus and Turkey. One of the peculiarities is the intense red color, almost coral. The meats are compact and white, with a unique and unmistakable flavor. We followed that with spaghettoni with cuttlefish ink. The pasta was terrific, but the portion was so huge that neither of us could finish it. The wine was a delicious Etna Bianco from Vine Franchetti.