Palermo, Thursday, May 2, 2024
We started the day at the charming tea and coffee cafe across the street; the staff is quirky and enormously friendly.
We were soon on our way to the Ballaró market, which we hadn’t seen at full cry last year. it lived up to its billing, with hawkers hawking, shoppers shopping, and eaters eating for block after block. Crowded, cacophonous, and lots of fun!
The fish are so cheap they’re almost given away.
The street food is famous here; we would have been sorely tempted if it weren’t 9 AM!
Arancini anyone?
The shortest distance between the market and our next goal, the area around the Norman Palace, led us through one of the poorest parts of Italy we had ever seen. We passed by a kind of impromptu flea market, where most of the sellers and customers seemed to be African immigrants.
One of my favorite places anywhere soon hove into view: San Giovanni degli Eremiti, a Norman church from 1132-48, with its five red domes.
The atmosphere in the churchyard is like no other space I know. You enter the church through a shady garden of palms, flowering jasmine, and cactus.
The sanctuary itself is not large; the nave is now bare, as the church is deconsecrated, but the honey colored stone somehow retains an air of intense spirituality. Roger II built the church on top of a mosque; part of the mosque remains, attached to the sanctuary.
The cloister is built around the old well of the mosque.
The Norman Palace is just around the corner. Built on the highest point in Palermo, the palace was originally a Phoenician fortress; the Arab rulers of the city made it their home; and the Normans expanded it far beyond its original bounds. It is thus a bit of a hodgepodge, impressive from the outside largely due to its size.
The central section is built around a fine courtyard.
The glory of the palace, though, is the Palatine Chapel. I wrote about this more extensively last year. So just the highlights now. Roger II began construction of the chapel in 1130, calling in Arab craftsmen for the exquisite wooden ceiling and Byzantine artists for the extraordinary mosaics that cover every inch of the walls. The mosaics in the apse were completed in 1143, some of the most extraordinary ecclesiastical art anywhere.
Standing in the shimmering golden light of the mosaics, you realize that Oscar Wilde had it just about right: “One really feels as if one was sitting at the heart of a great honeycomb looking at angels singing.”
We made sure to visit the royal gardens, with their huge Moreton Bay Ficus (Australian Banyan) and their remarkable air roots.
After a quick bite at the same place on the Corso that we ate last year, we parted ways: Vladimir heading home, while the three of us stuck our heads in the cathedral. The Catalan gothic exterior is imposing; the interior rather dull.
Our next stop was San Giorgio del Theatini of 1612. The sober facade doesn’t prepare the visitor for the exuberant interior.
Even the holy water stoups that flank the entrance give a sense for the liveliness of Palermitan baroque!
Just around the corner from the Quattro Canti, the center of old Palermo, is the Piazza Santa Caterina, with three remarkable churches. Santa Caterina itself, which we’ll see tomorrow, and the two Arabo-Norman churches of San Cataldo and Santa Maria dell’ Ammiraglio, known colloquially as La Martorana because in 1143 it was founded by George ofAntioch, admiral and ‘Emir of the Emirs’ under Roger II.
San Cataldo (1160) shares the lovely Arabo-Norman domes with San Giovanni.
And the interior is hauntingly beautiful. It is still an active church, belonging to the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre.
La Martorana (1143) is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site (along with the Palatine Chapel and the cathedrals at Monreale and Cefalu); it is so seldom open that we have never seen the interior which has mosaics to rival those of its larger brethren. Of the exterior, only the campanile remains from its original Norman construction.
After a short siesta back at the ranch, Connie, Sue, and I headed out for a walk toward the harbor. We stopped first at the Giardino Garibaldi, with even more spectacular ficus trees with air roots.
From there we walked to the Palazzo Abatellis, now home to the museum of Sicilian art. It was built in 1495 by Matteo Carnelivari, the same architect who designed our own Palazzo Ajutamicristo, in a late Catalan Gothic / early Renaissance style.
The harbor was next. Palermo’s harbor is enormous, so large that the Greeks called it “panormus,” “all harbor.”
We had views across to the commercial harbor, where we landed last year on the pestilent hydrofoil from the Aeolian Islands.
The three of us had an aperitif as we waited for Vladimir to join us for dinner.
Dinner was a disaster, certainly the worst meal I’ve eaten in Italy. Buatta Cucina Popolana is actually highly rated. And the Bans ate relatively well. But for whatever reason, our meal was horrendously delayed. We sat down at 7:30 and got our primo at 8:30, just as the Bans were getting their secondo. It was a baked pasta which was OK, pretty much like the baked ziti you get in a red sauce joint in central Jersey. We then waited another 45 minutes for our main courses…which were inedible. Sue had ordered Spedino, an Italian kebab, which had some vegetable and a couple of pieces of gristle. I had “Slow Food” pork which was so fat and chewy that I could eat only three bites. Ouch.