“Another victory like that and I’m done for“: King Pyrrhus of Epirus made his famous quip shortly before taking up arms in Sicily. Having just come back from the same island I’d like to make one of my own: “Another holiday like that and I’ll need a break“.
One of the advantages – there aren’t many, as far as we’re concerned – of Zakynthos being the beach bar of Europe is its airport’s many direct connections. By keeping an eye on the websites of low-cost carriers like Volotea you can pick up tickets to places like Sicily if you’re not too fussy about when you go or whether the plane turns up.
Enormous Panormus
I’m not sure we knew much at all about Palermo before getting there, other than what we’d read about it in John Julius Norwich’s Sicily. The island was first settled by the Greeks (at Syracuse, on the southeast coast, where we’d spend a couple of days later in the week), then passed back and forth like a hot arancini between them and the Romans, the Arabs, the Normans, the Germans, and the Byzantines. A lot of Rogers, Williams, and Fredericks. That’s until around 1200. After that it gets complicated.
Obviously, one can’t help but associate the island as well with organised crime, and the Mafia in particular: despite its age The Godfather casts a long shadow over Palermo in particular, as evidenced by all the Il Padrone merch. I’d recently watched series 1 of Il Cacciatore, a dramatisation of antimafia prosecutors in Palermo, occasionally pausing my viewing to admire the Sicilian countryside on my laptop. But however hard one tries to put this all out of mind, it’s hard to do so when one of the first things one sees on the drive from Palermo airport to the city is the monument to celebrated prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, blown up by the mob at that very spot in 1992.
We started our week in Sicily with four days in Palermo (Panormus to the Romans), restricting ourselves primarily to the old town, which we somehow got into our heads was the second biggest in Europe. We couldn’t work out what the biggest was – such a claim is hard to Google. According to ChatGPT, however, Palermo’s not even in the top 5 (Istanbul, Venice, Cracow, Tallinn, Prague) so now we don’t know what to think, except to say that it’s quite big indeed, and that over our four days, other than excursions to Monreale and Cefalù, we barely had to leave it.
Stepping out of our apartment complex onto Via Marqueda was like jumping in the deep end of a swimming pool – there was no shallow end, so to speak, no steps; we immediately had to watch out for e-bikes, scooters, ape (ah-pay) taxis (which often announce themselves with blaring Euro duff-duff), tourists wheeling their suitcases down the street, delivery guys with pallets of melons on a trolley, cats, brats, nutters, and nuns.
The very evening we arrived, we found out how unprepared we were. Blithely following our noses into the Vucciria district, the beating heart of the restaurant scene, we walked straight up to a decently-reviewed trattoria (Tina checks the Google Reviews for everything), expecting to waltz in senza prenotazione. If it was busy maybe they’d improvise a table, I thought, like they did for Henry and the other Goodfellas in the famous Copacabana scene.
Yeah, nah, that didn’t happen. You can see the meme now: One does not simply walk into a restaurant in Palermo without a reservation. Sweating into the evening air we were turned away from Fúnnaco PizzaLab by proxy – having seen the party in front of us get the flick we spared ourselves a similar fate, slinking back into the laneways through which we’d come; tired, ‘hangry’, and wise.
Due escursioni
Cefalù is a small town on the northern coast of the island about a third of the way towards Messina, whose cathedral, the Duomo di Cefalù, boasts a huge twelfth-century mosaic of Christ Pantocrator, “the greatest advertisement for Christianity anywhere on earth” according to Norwich. Of course it was under wraps when we visited, not that I was that pushed. I know, pearls before swine and all that, but what can I say? Another picture of God. The Arab roof was nice though.
In the event there was nothing for it but a cappuccino with the hordes at the old port and a dip at the spiaggia which felt, I must admit, like we were swimming in someone’s back yard. In the picture above you can see our bags parked under someone’s restaurant table.
I did manage to visit the small Museo Mandralisca, mainly just to see ‘Sicily’s Mona Lisa‘, the smirking Ritratto di un Uomo Ignoto. Probably the biggest impression Cefalù left on me, however, was when we stopped in for a refreshing gelato on the way back to the train station. How can a culture create something like the Duomo and also consider it a good idea to take a brioche and stuff it with ice cream? As I write this, I’m still full. Actually, it would only be the same culture if it had been the Normans, under Roger II, that came up with the brioche col tuppo (or tuppedda), but anyway.
More impressive yet than the brioche heart attack, the Normans created Monreale Cathedral, which lies halfway up one of the many mountains surrounding Palermo. King William the Good (But Not Above A Little Gerrymandering) needed his own cathedral to undermine the incumbent head of the church in Palermo, so found a nearby hill in 1174 and started digging. It’s a half-an-hour bus ride out of town, from where the cathedral was a relief from the mid-morning heat on the morning we visited.
With illiteracy the norm churches were often known as The People’s Bible, and Monreale Cathedral had a lot indeed to look at on its walls. Tina was well prepared and was able to pick out some of the stories (Adam and Eve, etc.) depicted high up on the columns. For my part, I do like a good cloister, and the mosaics on the adjacent cloisters here were well worth the stroll.
A Made Man
On a trip like this, the traveller frequently passes souvenir shops and mini markets, exposing himself to the symbols of the location in the form of fridge magnets, postcards (they still sell them?!), ceramics, etc. In Sicily’s case the recurring motifs are the Trinacria (the Medusa’s head, sprouting three-legs, found on the island’s (and Isle of Man’s) Spanish-coloured flag), ceramic pine cones, puppets, and, as mentioned already, Il Padrino (The Godfather) t-shirts, etc. The word trinacria, by the way, comes from the Greek (don’t they all, darling), and refers to the island’s roughly triangular shape.
But it was none of these that I had come here in search of. In an otherwise undistinguished travelogue set in Sicily, one of the Top Gear wits went out of his way to buy what looked like a regular ol’ north of England flat cap. That flat cap, one learned, was a Sicilian Coppola. I had to have one, and not just because that’s the surname of the director of The Godfather (his name in English therefore comes out as Francis Ford Hat). Just off Via Roma (what a satisfying street name) a nice old coppola artist sold me a blue one, and even posed outside.
Apparently these coppolas were adopted from the British a couple of centuries ago, possibly during the island’s wave of Anglophilia during the Napoleonic Wars when Britain, alone, guaranteed the security of Sicily.
Having watched both The Godfather and The Godfather Part II since coming home, I can confirm that there are indeed plenty of scenes of Michael and Vito back in the old country sporting fine coppolas. Indeed I felt like a member of the family wearing mine around Palermo, and I never let anyone know what I was thinking. Next on our Sicilian movies list is – you guessed it – The Godfather Part III, the dramatic culmination of which occurs on the steps of Palermo’s Teatro Massimo.
As an aside, during our four days being Palermitans we saw a lot of rubbish on the streets, and on several occasions came across those unattended refuse drop-off sites with their spillover piles of blue bags more familiar to us from Zakynthos. Palermo was a messy city; we took that in our stride. I just hoped that it would make Tina see Zakynthos in the context of a bigger problem, not as the uniquely unkempt case she fears it’s become.
Litter or not, though, we loved it. We’d been lucky though: as hot as the weather was for us, we narrowly avoided the heatwave that struck the Mediterranean shortly after we got back. And we managed to get into Fúnnaco PizzaLab on our second attempt. In an atmospheric laneway ventilated by breezes coming from La Cala, the town’s marina, we ate good pizza surrounded by English couples and six-packs of Aussie girls, our pleasure enhanced by the constant stream of losers getting turned away. No prenotazione? No pizza. Ciao.
kouklahouse.com 