Unfortunately, Husbear wasn’t feeling too great this morning, so we got a late start. First thing was a walk through the Ballaró market, apparently one of the two most vital in Palermo and the one closest to our apartment.
It was amazing – narrow alleys chock full of produce and fish and meats, with the detritus left over from cutting artichokes and cauliflower off of their stems filling the street.
The fish looked amazingly fresh and clear eyed. There were a couple of cured fish vendors, including a guy selling baccalao and smoked sardines out of the back of an Ape truck.
People drove their scooters (and the occasional car) right down the middle of the market, which meant you had to be on constant lookout.
We bought a couple of clementines to much on for a late breakfast type thing, and the guy wrapped them in a cone of newspaper for us.
Then, off in the direction of the Teatro Massimo (Palermo’s premier opera house) for possible lunch, but first we stopped at a duo of churches that sit next to each other along Via Maqueda. The Arabic-style square one (San Cataldo) was closed, but we did get in to see the golden mosaics at the Chiesa della Martorana. They were beautiful, the gold twinkling in the low light. The mosaics were completely different than any of the concurrent Gothic styles you see in Florence.
After seeing the churches, we walked through the Quattro Canti again – the baroque Four Corners, arguably the center of Palermo.
We went by the Teatro Massimo to see if there were tours being given in English (though our Italian has progressed, it’s still very difficult to follow fast spoken Italian), and after a bit of confusion and a false start on a tour that turned out to be in Italian, we did actually get to go on one in English. We saw where the carriages pulled in to drop off the nobles, the Pompeiian Room where gentlemen would meet to discuss the affairs of the day – taking advantage of the amazing acoustics, enhanced by the presence of false doors – the room where the ladies could gather to watch people enter the main waiting area so they could more easily make fun of their clothes, and of course the opera hall itself, a giant creation seven stories tall with removable panels in the ceiling frescoes to let in some air. A great building, where you can’t take pictures.
And it’s where the end of the Godfather part three was filmed! There’s some movie fun for you.
Then, on to one of Palermo’s most famous snack bars, Mazzara, where I finally got to order an arancino (a fried stuffed riceball, so called for its similarity in appearance to an orange) and Husbear got to try his first Sicilian cannolo. The arancino was delicious, soft and moist, and the wedge of baked pasta I had with it wasn’t half bad either.
You know how when you’re little, you love eating cake batter? The filling on this cannolo was like the best cake batter ever, stuffed in a fried cookie shell. I tried one of the Sicilian specialties known as cassata (this tiny one was called a cassatina), which basically takes the cannoli filling and layers it with yellow cake, and then surrounds the whole thing with marzipan. Very good, though so sweet I felt my teeth start to rot out. (Oh, and we had a fig and orange cookie, which was delicious but not that exciting.)
Our last sightseeing stop of the day took us back near our hotel to the Palazzo Reale, the palace of the Norman kings which apparently originally dates back to Arab use in the 9th century. It contains what’s described as Palermo’s true artistic treasure, the Cappella Palatina, a chapel all done in beautiful gold-leaf Byzantine mosaic. It was really neat to see this mosaic after that in the Chiesa della Martorana earlier – we could really see that the quality was much better. The room also included a lot of mosaics that showed obvious borrowing from Arabic themes, such as intricate knotwork in the floor. Too bad that a lot of the chapel was under scaffolding, but I had a lot of fun identifying all of the Old Testament stories.
We then moved on to another part of the palace that’s open to the public, the Royal Apartments, which includes the current seat of the Sicilian Parliament.
There was a fair amount of damage still from the earthquake here in 2002, but we were still able to see some more beautiful mosaics (in King Roger’s apartments)
as well as a hilarious room done in the Chinoiserie style, from the time when European nobles became obsessed with all things Chinese and had entire rooms painted with fanciful “Chinese” scenes that are pretty divorced from reality.
After that, we were able to actually go under the palace to see some uncovered fortifications, parts of which date back to the 5th century BCE, though with these things it’s always hard to really tell what you’re looking at.
Back to the apartment to rest up and do a little reading before dinner, and then we headed out at 9:30 since we were starting to feel a bit peckish. The place we wanted to go, run by the husband of the woman we’re renting this apartment from, was unfortunately closed so we wandered the streets before settling on a fast-food vaguely “Middle Eastern” style joint. We had some extra-psychedelic looking eats, which were not half bad and were extra cheap.
Worth noting is that I actually kept count this time – we had 11 people come up to our table to try to sell us things while we were eating. Lighters, glowing fiber-optic centerpieces, flashing keychains, roses, you name it. I always feel guilty for not buying anything from these guys, but I’d go broke much too fast were I to try to get a little something from each of them.
Tomorrow’s our last day in Palermo! What are we going to do?
