Palermo, Sicily - Italy

What at an awesome few days we had in Palermo! Amazing Sicilian food, friendly locals, Palermos annual festival and warm evening beers. We arrived early off the ferry so checked in and headed straight to the city market, but seeing as it was about 7 or so, we had a funny conversation with an old Italian man having his morning espresso that it was closed until later in the day. So after also trying to talk with the café owners about the football as they were asking me about it (or so I think they were anyway) we headed to check out the city.

We booked a walking tour of the city and were really lucky we were shown around by a lovely local lady (and for only 10Euro), and although she said she had a group of 40 people the day before, we were her only customers that morning. She guided us for 2hours around the churches, piazzas and markets of the city, but what really blew me away was the history of the city. In a nutshell, it had many influences from the Greeks, Romans, Byzentines, and Arabs. They were able to work together in most cases to create quite a melting pot of cultures, but during world war 2 the allies moved through and the harbor/waterfront was heavily bombed. Nowadays although the city has mainly been restored, it is still recovering from a lot of corruption and intimidation that the mafia have inflicted on the city.

That night was the festival of Santa Rosalia and was the most important religious celebration of the year, as Santa Rosalia is the patron saint of the city who they believed relieved the city from the black plague in the 1600s. The festival went down the main street of the city with floats, and bands played music followed by fireworks at the end of the street. It was a pretty great way to finish our first day. We went back out the next night as we enjoyed having a few quiet drinks at our favourite little spot down one of the alleyways, but this time there was a much quieter parade happening, it had a stronger religious focus this time around where they carried Santa Rosalias remains (inside her shrine) down the street.

We then had a quieter couple of days, but continued to shop at the local markets and check out the local architecture. But I really stepped out of my normal comfort zone by checking out a ballet performance at Palermos opera house. The opera house was again a pretty amazing piece of architecture, and the ballet was good too. I couldn’t help but look at it from a sporting performance aspect though and admire their flexibility and strength with some of the things they did. 

But the rest of our time in Palermo was spent eating the local food, which we both got stuck into. Louise and I both love the bakeries as they sold some pretty elaborate pastries. But my favorites were these risotto balls called Arancinas that were filled with rice, mozzarella cheese, and ham or other meats - So good! Unfortunately we had to leave Palermo and our great hostel that we stayed in, but looked forward to heading to Lyon to catch up with Lachie and check out Lyon and the Tour de France.