Palermo is not one of the grand cities of the world. It doesn’t have the history of Rome, the beauty of Paris, or the energy of New York. It doesn’t even have the population of El Paso. But greatness is often defined by what’s missing, and what Palermo doesn’t have could fill a book: rainy weather, long lines, exorbitant prices, an inflated sense of self. It is gloriously free from the jungles of selfie sticks, the markets of mass seduction, the burdens of breathless magazine profiles. And don’t expect that to change anytime soon: with three thousand years of history behind it, Palermo isn’t the type of place that tolerates abrupt pivots.
That’s not to say the Sicilian capital is static. Locals will tell you that change is afoot, not just in the faces you see around town but in everything else you see around town. Suddenly a handful of boutique hotels have materialized, decaying palazzi have been restored, a few restaurants have started cooking food that isn’t Italian. People whisper about a rising tide of tourism—of cruise ships and package tours and the specter of international interest that could further fuel a citywide transformation.
But you don’t come to Palermo to stay in minimalist hotels and eat avocado toast; you come to Palermo to be in Palermo, to drink espressos as dark and thick as crude oil, to eat tangles of toothsome spaghetti bathed in buttery sea urchins, to wander the streets at night, feeling perfectly charmed on one block, slightly concerned on the next. To get lost. After a few days, you learn to turn down one street because it smells like jasmine and honeysuckle in the morning; you learn to avoid another street because in the heat of the afternoon the air is thick with the suggestion of swordfish three days past its prime.
You come here because everyone wants to pretend, for a few days at least, that they are Italian, and there is no easier city in which to do that than Palermo. You can walk the markets without bumping shoulders with other tourists; eat ice cream, like a Sicilian, at any hour of the day; have a late dinner down an alley cast in an orange summer glow; rent an apartment on a narrow street in the old city and hang your wet clothes from the balcony. Before you pack your bags and catch that flight back to Cork or Colorado or Copenhagen, you can have one last lemon granita at the sidewalk café that has quickly become your second home in the city and think to yourself, So this is what it would be like.
* * *
Of course, life in Palermo is more complex than a few espressos and a plate of pasta might suggest. Over the past three thousand years, Palermo has been passed around like a giant doobie among history’s most fiendish conquerors: from the Phoenicians to the Greeks, from the Greeks to the Carthaginians, from Hannibal’s men to the legions of the Roman Empire. Everyone took a toke: the Muslims, who laid siege to Sicily in the ninth century and made Palermo the capital on a scale with Córdoba and Cairo; the Normans, who spent great sums of money ushering in an era of ostentation and hedonism before abandoning the island four hundred years later; the Spaniards, rulers of the island for nearly three hundred years during the height of their empire, administered by viceroys who struggled to balance the demands of the monarchy with the will of the Sicilians.
Eventually the great general Giuseppe Garibaldi, sailing down from Genoa with just a thousand men, liberated Sicily from the Bourbons and set it on the path to become a part of the new Kingdom of Italy, as the country of Italy as we know it now unified in 1861.
But Palermo’s history as a receptacle of tragedy and invader angst didn’t end there. Even in unified Italy, it was something of a neglected stepchild. For a country whose history and culture owe so much to the bottom half of the boot, it’s shocking how easy it is for the north to write off the south in a few flippant pronouncements. “It’s a mess down there,” they say in the cafés of Milan and Turin. “The south is corrupt. Confused. Stuck in time.” They are the same people who would draw a line south of Rome and divide the country once again.
The twentieth century wasn’t kind to the south of Italy, and it wasn’t kind to Palermo. Crushing poverty ensured a mass exodus in the early 1900s, as hundreds of thousands of Sicilians fled to Australia and the United States in search of a future beyond their desolate island. In 1943, the Allies, led by US warplanes, brought war to the city, bombing its port and old quarter back into the sixteenth century. In the wake of the war, with the country in ruins, the Mafia found ways to exploit the island’s gripping poverty and torpid reconstruction, transforming the Cosa Nostra from a countryside collective into a powerful urban organism. (The fact that the Mafia and the Allies had, by some reports, a working relationship during the war only further solidified its holdings across Sicily.)
For the last half of the twentieth century, Palermo served as a nerve center for organized crime across Italy as the city descended into a bubbling cauldron of assassinations, citizen shakedowns, and crippling government corruption. La Cosa Nostra: this thing of ours became a thing of theirs, spreading like a virus through all facets of Sicilian life (and to the lives of Sicilians abroad). Il Sacco di Palermo, the Sack of Palermo, saw the orange groves, greenways, and rustic villas on the outskirts of the city replaced with shoddy apartment blocks controlled by the Mafia and its friends in government. Combined with the devastated old city, Palermo lost much of its soul, and those who could afford to move began their exodus off the island.
You don’t need another recitation of mob brutality—Hollywood and history books have done too much of it already—but what you need to know is that Sicily fought back: brave judges and emboldened politicians, angry citizens and activist organizations spent the 1980s and ’90s countering the Cosa Nostra, chipping away at that great granite albatross of Sicilian society until it was nothing but pebbles and dust. Law officials estimate that up to 70 percent of local businesses still pay “protection” fees to the Mafia, but the collective efforts have crippled the Cosa Nostra in ways it is unlikely to ever recover from.
Today, Palermo wears the marks of its many rulers over the past three millennia: Greek columns and Roman arches, couscous and currants, bombed-out buildings and corner-store kickbacks. Though the events that shaped the looks and smells and tastes of this city may have been harsh, even by history’s cruel standards, the result is something to behold, a multicultural milieu that greets you on every street corner, market stand, dinner table.
Palermo’s position as a bellwether of the whims of geopolitics shows no sign of waning. In fact, there is a new force stirring in the south that once again will test the resolve of the entire island.
The latest group of invaders doesn’t come to conquer; it comes to survive. Beginning in the early 2000s, as the perils of life in Africa grew too great to tolerate, huge swaths of immigrants in search of a new life set off for European soil. At first it was a trickle—one boat of families embarking from Libya, another of young men looking for work. Most took the land route through Turkey and into Greece, when the border was porous enough to let thousands enter each week. But in early 2016, the European Union signed a controversial deal with Turkey that effectively closed off the route, forcing the tens of thousands of migrants leaving northern and eastern Africa to seek out a new route across the sea.
An afternoon ride through Piazza Pretoria.
Michael Magers
Not only is the trek up through northern Africa harrowing, it exposes migrants to two extraordinary dangers: first, the sinister network of human traffickers in Libya set up to take advantage of the wave of desperation. And second, the perils of the sea itself—a 160-mile stretch between Libya and the island of Lampedusa whose calm appearance belies its ability to capsize and crush those who seek to cross it. The two coexist in a vicious calculus: desperation equals demand, and as the ticket prices grow, space on the shabby sea vessels shrinks and, with it, the possibility of survival.
In 2016, more than five thousand migrants died on the sea voyage to Europe, turning the Mediterranean into a watery graveyard. But the economy of people moving shows no signs of slowing, as Italy’s ports of entry buckle under the weight of the African exodus. Those who do make it into European waters are rescued by the Italian navy, interned on Lampedusa or in one of the other main way stations, then typically granted access to the rest of Europe. Many dream of opportunity in northern Europe, but for an increasing number of migrants, Sicily is the first and final stop. From 2015 to 2017, 400,000 African refugees arrived in Sicily, many of them adopting Palermo as their new home.
Africa has always been a vital thread in the Sicilian tapestry; of all the invaders who left their mark on this island, none had a deeper impact on Sicilian culture than the Arabs. “Norman minds dissolved in the vapors of Muslim culture,” wrote John McPhee in The New Yorker in 1966, claiming that the Catholics “went Muslim with such remarkable style that even Muslim poets were soon praising the new Norman Xanadus.” That meant clothing, architecture, and dialect; but above all, the most enduring impact has been on the cuisine of Sicily—in the sprawling economy of citrus, so ubiquitous that even your dreams are suffused with its sunshine fragrance; in Sicily’s superlative pastry culture, fueled by almonds and pistachios, crushed, puffed, and pureed into countless forms; in the stamens of saffron, the kernels of couscous, the sweet-and-sour soul of so many of Sicily’s most emblematic dishes. The rapid return of the same peoples who helped shape this island feels like Sicilian culture coming full circle.
To witness the demographic transformation at its most potent, head to the Ballarò district in Palermo, long ground zero of Sicily’s immigrant population. This is the birthplace of Mario Balotelli, an international soccer star and one of Palermo’s most famous sons, the child of two Ghanaian immigrants who came here for the same reason that tens of thousands of Africans risk their lives every month to make the crossing.
Located in the dead center of the city, Ballarò is also home to Palermo’s largest market, a meandering outdoor pantry that feeds much of the city. Over the years, the market has evolved to reflect the changing population of Palermo—both the constituents and the ingredients have grown more colorful since I was last here in 2012. At no time does Ballarò flex its multicultural muscle harder than on the weekend. “Go on Sunday morning,” a journalist friend from the island tells me over drinks. “That’s when Palermo becomes Africa.”
By first light, immigrants haul crates of melons and buckets of ice over the narrow cobblestone streets. Old men sell salted capers and branches of wild oregano while the young ones build their fish stands, one silvery torqued body at a time, like an edible art installation. It’s a startling scene: gruff young palermitani, foul-mouthed and wreathed in cigarette smoke, lovingly laying out each fish at just the right angle, burrowing its belly into the ice as if to mimic its swimming position in the ocean. Sicilian sun and soil and ingenuity have long produced some of Italy’s most prized raw ingredients, and the colors of the market serve as a map of the island’s agricultural prowess: the forest green pistachios of Bronte; the Crayola-bright lemons and oranges of Paternò; the famous pomodorini of Pachino, fiery orbs of magical tomato intensity.
The enigmatic, ever-evolving Ballarò market.
Michael Magers
The only thing brighter than the Sicilian produce is the African apparel: kente cloth and head wraps, tribal dress and hand-carved accessories. Women in hijabs peel and chunk yucca beside vats of simmering beef spleen and wheels of pecorino. On the fringes of the market, men push televisions in baby strollers as Nubian queens hold down the park benches like curbside thrones. On balconies above, families break bread in village vernacular. Below, young Sicilian couples haggle over the price of faux Nikes and pleather purses in the Palermo dialect.
By 10 A.M. on Sunday, a line forms outside the Kubis barbershop as young men await their date with the clippers. A collage of famous faces outside serves as the menu: the Will Smith, the Terrence Howard, the Drake, and, of course, the always-evolving Balotelli, who changes hairstyles like most of us change our minds.
Across from the blankets and the boys at the barbershop, looking out from his halal butcher store Bismillah, Anwar Bhuiyan remembers his early days in Palermo. “That was me eighteen years ago,” he says, stroking the end of his foot-long white beard as if it were a cat curled up on his chest. He arrived from Bangladesh, an educated English teacher with little prospects for survival back home. “I started selling just like them—small stuff directly off the street.” Eventually he earned enough to trade the blanket for a table, a semiofficial post in the Ballarò market. From a table to a stand to a storefront, eighteen years of sweating it out under the Sicilian sun, waiting for returns on his life’s investment. Now he sells cuts of lamb and beef and spices to Muslims and Christians alike.
In Anwar’s story you find a blueprint for integration, but he isn’t hopeful for the latest wave of immigrants. “There are too many of us and too few jobs. The system is broken. We are hungry.”
Palermo has long been one of Italy’s poorest cities. Unemployment hovers near 25 percent—hardly an inviting number for newcomers. I ask Anwar if he ever thinks about pushing farther north, as so many do in search of better prospects. “I can’t leave now. My son was born here. He doesn’t speak my language. He’s Italian.”
* * *
Leoluca Orlando has lived a thousand lives. Award-winning actor in Germany. Respected Jesuit scholar. Close friend of Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. Consigliere to Pope Francis. Anti-Mafia crusader. Political firebrand. Mayor of Palermo three times over.
No doubt he’s busy living one of those lives right now. I’ve been waiting in the mayor’s palace for more than an hour. When I received the directions from his assistant, I figured that “mayor’s palace” might be a euphemism for a corner office in an old building, but by every working definition—the velvet tapestries, the chiaroscuro art hanging from the walls, the embarrassment of marble—Mayor Orlando runs Palermo from a palazzo. I spend the better part of thirty minutes admiring the marble busts of mayors past of Palermo: Salesio Balsano with his cue-ball dome and bushy mustache; Giovanni Raffaele, he of tiny eyes and aggressive chin strap; and Pietro Ugo delle Favare, three-time mayor during the late nineteenth century, with a mop of a mustache and muttonchops that tickle his neck.
Orlando, bucking the trend of his prodigiously bearded predecessors, is clean-shaven, with a dark drift of the midlength hair that Italian men wear so well. He’s built like Diego Maradona: short, thick, and athletic, with a lounge singer’s martini-soaked good looks. He explains that he’s late because he’s spent all day on Lampedusa, the first port of call for the migrant boats that make it to Europe. He played pickup soccer with the refugees, and you can still see the residual sweat above his brow. (He moves and thinks with such frenetic energy, it seems unlikely that the sweat ever dries.)
“English is okay, right? It’s my third language. Sicilian’s my first. German’s my second.” After a long pause, he adds with a mischievous smile, “Italian’s my fourth.”
Orlando first arrived on the political scene in the late 1970s. Back then, as a rising star in Sicily’s Christian Democratic Party, he joined the ranks of a young contingent of crusaders bringing the fight directly to the Mafia. One by one, the judges and politicians on the frontlines of the battle were killed in an increasingly brazen series of assassinations. When the president of Sicily, Piersanti Mattarella, Orlando’s close friend and partner in those efforts, was shot in the streets of Palermo in January 1980, he left behind a dying wish to have Orlando inherit his political legacy. In 1985, still in the grips of the Mafia battle, Orlando was elected mayor of Palermo. Since then, more than four thousand mafiosi have been jailed as the Cosa Nostra has lost its stranglehold on Sicilian society. “I haven’t gone anywhere in thirty years without five bodyguards,” he tells me.
But the life I’m most interested in is his current one as third-term mayor of Pa-lermo. Twelve years and thirteen lives after his first two terms running this city, Orlando decided to run once again for mayor in 2012, against protégé-turned-rival Fabrizio Ferrandelli. He won with 74 percent of the vote. His latest tenure has coincided with a substantial transformation of the city’s infrastructure: the reshaping of the old part of Palermo into a burgeoning commercial and tourism district, the naming of Palermo’s Arabic-influenced churches as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
But what matters most to Orlando, what he sees as his most pressing and consequential charge, is managing the stream of migrants pouring across the Mediterranean, with only his island between them and a new life in prosperous Europe. He doesn’t see Sicily as a stepping-stone for those in search of more prosperous territory but as a final destination.
“Palermo isn’t a Sicilian city in Italy. It’s a Middle Eastern city in the middle of the Mediterranean.” To the conservative contingent, that might sound like an insult, but to Orlando, it’s a source of pride. He motions to the Chiesa di San Cataldo, seen through the window of his office: Norman facade, bulging red domes, Arabic merlons; once a mosque, now a Catholic church. He knows Palermo’s past and who and what built this city, and he sees the immigration crisis as the next chapter in the city’s impossible history.
I ask him at what point the migrants can consider themselves palermitani. “From the second they arrive in this city. The resident card is the new form of slavery, the migrant boats the new slave ships. We need to accept that globalization isn’t just an economic reality but a human one, too.” Unlike many critics of mass immigration, Orlando sees no need to distinguish refugees from economic immigrants: both are in desperate need of a new life.
His political style turns around a mixture of bluster, blunt-force determination, and a sense of boundless optimism. He’s been known to dismiss the very real criticisms of his opponents with platitudes. When I voice the concerns I’ve picked up from cabdrivers, food stand owners, and citizens like Anwar, he brushes them aside: “I won the mayoral race with seventy-four percent of the vote. The people are with me. It’s the politicians who don’t understand.”
In the short time I spend with Sindaco Orlando, I find myself persuaded by his vision for the new world—one in which borders slowly dissolve, in which cultures blend into tapestries, in which mayors have more power than presidents and prime ministers. But I am an outsider, free to bask in the sunny glow of Orlando’s vision without suffering through the grinding reality of daily life in Palermo. Who to believe: the immigrant cook? the world-weary taxi driver with an unemployed son and a family to feed? the overzealous mayor?
For every enthusiastic politician who views Palermo as a grand and thriving experiment, there’s a cabdriver struggling to make sense of a city he no longer recognizes. For every immigrant who finds a home in the bustle of Ballarò, a refugee family struggles to survive in Sicily. But this isn’t a zero-sum game: Orlando wants to believe that Palermo, a city that throughout history has survived and adapted, can once again bend and stretch to fit the demands of its shifting citizenry.
* * *
Before I leave the mayor’s palace, he reaches into his desk and pulls out a folder thick with printouts. He’s done his homework. Though we’ve spent an hour discussing immigration efforts and local politics, he knows I’m here to eat. “Palermo is ranked the fifth greatest city in the world for street food. Don’t forget that most of it came from Africa. Go taste for yourself.”
Little does he know that I’ve been tasting for myself on nearly every block since I first touched down. Keep in mind, this isn’t the street food of Southeast Asia, where fresh herbs and citrus and chilies conspire to pack huge flavor into small packages. The street food of Palermo isn’t meant to stretch your taste buds into acrobatic positions; it’s meant to obliterate appetites.
In fact, much of what you do in Palermo will involve eating more than you probably should. “A person eating must make crumbs” goes one of the great Palermo proverbs, and this city makes its crumbs in all shapes and sizes.
Palermo is dotted everywhere with frittura shacks—street carts and storefronts specializing in fried foods of all shapes and cardiac impacts. On the fringes of the Ballarò market are bars serving pane e panelle, fried wedges of mashed chickpeas combined with potato fritters and stuffed into a roll the size of a catcher’s mitt. This is how the vendors start their days; this is how you should start yours, too. If fried chickpea sandwiches don’t register as breakfast food, consider an early evening at Friggitoria Chiluzzo, posted on a plastic stool with a pack of locals, knocking back beers with plates of fried artichokes and arancini, glorious balls of saffron-stained rice stuffed with ragù and fried golden—another delicious ode to Africa.
Indeed, frying food is one of the favorite pastimes of the palermitani, and they do it—as all great frying should be done—with a mix of skill and reckless abandon. Ganci is among the city’s most beloved oil baths, a sliver of a store offering more calories per square foot than anywhere I’ve ever eaten. You can smell the mischief a block before you hit the front door: pizza topped with french fries and fried eggplant, fried rice balls stuffed with ham and cubes of mozzarella, and a ghastly concoction called spiedino that involves a brick of béchamel and meat sauce coated in bread crumbs and fried until you could break someone’s window with it. A hundred meters down the road you’ll find a handful of fruit stands with artful produce arrangements and spinning cylinders of fresh juice to wash away your sins.
This type of blunt street food is a source of passion and pride in Palermo. Take another local favorite: pane con la milza, or pani ca’ meusa in Sicilian: beef spleen stewed in lard, then stuffed into a roll slathered with more lard and topped with grated caciocavallo cheese. Antica Focacceria S. Francesco, a nineteenth-century institution down one of Palermo’s loveliest streets, serves up the oldest version in the city, along with other great Sicilian classics, but most prefer the sandwich from Pani Ca’ Meusa near the port. Regardless of where you buy it, eat it fast; as it cools, it becomes more and more apparent that you are eating a spleen burger.
Even the nonfried, nonorgan offerings pack a punch. Babbaluci, thumb-size snails, are a star of the Ballarò market scene. Eat them like a Sicilian, sucking the little coil of meat directly from the shell and with it the bath of olive oil, garlic, and parsley they’re cooked in. Sfincione, Palermo-style pizza, takes the basic staple and adds heft: thicker crust, stronger cheese, bread crumbs, anchovies. Look for the thick, spongy, addictive squares peddled from the backs of the three-wheeled trucks that announce their slices through a loudspeaker.
Gelato serves as the city’s collective palate cleanser, and a scoop is never more than a few blocks away. For the greatest illustration of Sicily’s I-don’t-give-a-fuck-what-time-it-is attitude about ice cream, head to Ideal Caffè Stagnitta, a shoebox-sized bar of impeccable beauty in the shadow of the Martorana, the wondrous church of Arab and Norman stock built in 1143. The baristas here pull one of the city’s finest shots of espresso and a textbook ristretto, but you’re here for a cold caffeine fix. The coffee granita belongs in a museum: bracing in its bittersweet intensity, alarming in the purity of its flavor and power of its caffeine kick. Try it in a glass with a scoop of thickened cream, or go for glory and have it tucked into a pillow of brioche, made dark with currents of espresso folded into the dough. Be sure to savor this morning moment for everything it’s worth; it will be the high point of your day.
Gelato: Breakfast of campioni.
Michael Magers
* * *
You could live a happy life (or a long vacation) in this city subsisting on fried chickpeas and loaded pizza, simmered guts and espresso ice cream, but you would be missing a cornerstone of Palermo cuisine: the trattorie, those bastions of satisfying, inexpensive cooking strewn throughout the city. There’s no place better to start your hunt for a trattoria than at Piazza Vigliena, Palermo’s central crossroads since the viceroys built the intersection in the 1600s—a model of European urbanization for centuries to come. It’s also known as the Quattro Canti—Four Corners; nearly identical at first glance, each corner is marked with a different Spanish king of Sicily, a different season, and a different patroness of Palermo. Each marks the entrance to a different barrio: Albergheria; Seralcadio; Castellammare or Loggia; and Kalsa: the heart of the city.
Positioned on the western corner of the Quattro Canti, Bisso Bistrot is a Palermo institution made new again. For twenty-one years, the restaurant, then known as Santandrea, lived on the edge of the Vucciria Market, one of Palermo’s liveliest (and seediest) public spaces. For decades the Bisso family fought a silent battle against the Mafia, refusing to pay pizzo (protection money) in an area where organized crime still simmers. After a series of escalating threats, the restaurant was burned badly one night in 2015, leaving the owners to escape out the back door with fifty guests under police protection as firefighters fought the blaze. “We were an absolute anomaly for the ‘law’ in this neighborhood,” patriarch Pippo Bisso told La Repubblica shortly after, declaring the restaurant dead.
Bisso Bistrot is its reincarnation, found a few blocks down the road in the space that once housed Libreria Dante, the bookshop of choice for the city’s literati. From early afternoon to midnight, the place is packed with a mix of stylish palermitani and happy tourists, either smart or lucky. The name sounds French, but the food is pure palermitano. The Bisso family matriarch, Anna Maria, handles the cooking, dispatching plates of artichoke caponata and swordfish involtino to the chattering masses. The fact that you may need to drink a few glasses of zibibbo on the sidewalk before your table is ready says something beautiful about the Palermo spirit: you can bomb it, you can blackmail it, you can push it to the brink, but it can never be defeated.
You’ll find trattorie brimming with the spirit of Sicily no matter which direction you head from the Four Corners. At Zia Pina, you will find no menu at all, just Pina and her helpers cooking up great piles of stuffed sardines, baby octopus, and fried red mullet. At Trattoria Basile, you take your ticket and build your meal piece by piece: a few stuffed eggplant, a plate of spaghetti and clams, maybe a bit of grilled sausage. If you can eat more than €5 worth of food, you may secretly be Sicilian. At Osteria Mangia & Bevi, guests eat pasta fritta, a crunchy revival of yesterday’s tomato-slicked spaghetti, on checkered tablecloths, on bar stools made from wine boxes, on any surface they can find.
The reason the trattoria is so important to Sicilians, though, has little to do with the food itself. It’s because meals here are meant to be stretched out over the course of hours, and the trattoria format—appetizers followed by pasta followed by a main course, all washed down with bottles of inexpensive wine—makes a marathon meal feel like a leisurely jog. One of the better meals I eat in Palermo is a three-hour bacchanalia with a pair of Sicilians at the bustling Ferro di Cavallo on Via Venezia, a block east of the Quattro Canti. Waiters press glasses of prosecco into the palms of young palermitani gathered out front. Streetlights cast a gentle glow over the sidewalk tables. The menus are printed directly on the tablecloths: €4 for antipasti, €5 for pasta, €7 for meat and fish.
All of this could fall flat, feel too much like a caricature of a Sicilian trattoria, if the food itself weren’t so damn good: arancini, saffron-scented rice fried into crunchy, greaseless golf balls; polpette di pesce spada, swordfish meatballs with a taste so deep and savory they might as well be made of dry-aged beef; and a superlative version of caponata di melanzane, that ubiquitous Sicilian starter of eggplant, capers, and various other vegetation, stewed into a sweet and savory jam that you will want to smear on everything. Everything around you screams Italy, but those flavors on the end of the fork? The sweet-and-sour tandem, the stain of saffron, the grains of rice: pure Africa.
The pasta: even better. Chewy noodles tinted jet black with squid ink and tossed with sautéed rings and crispy legs of calamari—a sort of nose-to-tail homage to the island’s cherished cephalopod. And Palermo’s most famous dish, pasta con le sarde, a bulge of thick spaghetti strewn with wild fennel, capers, raisins, and, most critically, a half dozen plump sardines slow cooked until they melt into a briny ocean ragù. Sweet, salty, fatty, funky—Palermo in a single bite.
Yet somehow, even with this lovely bounty before us, the food is overshadowed by the conversation at our table. As we plod our way through the meal, Alessio Genovese, a journalist from nearby Trapani, talks about Palermo’s polemical mayor, about Sicily’s ambivalent relationship with the rest of Italy, about the microdialects and cuisines found all over the island: “You can move from one village to the next and find that the food and the language have changed completely.”
Four times the server comes by to pick up the plate of pasta, and four times she is sent back empty-handed—each time with an increasingly intense waggle from Genovese’s finger. I put my fork down an hour earlier, but the two Sicilians push forward, eating, drinking, and talking in such a perfectly balanced manner that time seems to stop moving altogether. The oil from a pasta, the last drops of wine, the final thought in a conversation: crumbs are precious in Palermo, and they will be eaten—with the tines of a fork, the heel of a baguette, or the tip of an index finger.
On the opposite side of the Quattro Canti, back in the heart of Ballarò, a different type of dinner-table conversation is taking place, one that could help reshape Palermo into the twenty-first-century city Mayor Orlando imagines. Moltivolti is not your typical trattoria: founded in 2017, it’s a co–working space and kitchen with owners from six different countries. It’s a space where refugees can learn Italian, accumulate job skills, share stories with Sicilians. It’s also a fully functioning restaurant with a menu that reads like an edible distillation of the Ballarò mosaic: couscous with chunks of braised lamb, spicy Afghan chicken, Greek moussaka, and pasta alla Norma, penne with sweet tomatoes, eggplant, and salty ribbons of aged ricotta, the most Sicilian of all pastas.
As I work my way through the Middle East and up through northern Africa, a group of young black men filters through the entrance. One by one they take their seats at a long communal table as bowls of pasta come trickling out of the kitchen: thick noodles with meat sauce heaped well above the brim of the bowl. They arrived last month from Gambia, where so many of Palermo’s newest faces come from. “They’re not used to eating so much pasta,” the server tells me, “but it’s growing on them.”
Mohamed Shapoor Safari, a chef at Moltivolti, escaped from the Taliban in Afghanistan in the early 2000s and made his way by land and sea to Sicily—an excruciating four-year journey. Now he cooks for one of the restaurant world’s most diverse clienteles: well-heeled palermitani share communal tables with wide-eyed tourists and recently arrived refugees. Along with his sous chef, a Gambian refugee, he cooks traditional Afghan cuisine, plus Moroccan and sub-Saharan African specialties. He also cooks Sicilian classics: caponata, pasta con le sarde, arancini—the kinds of dishes whose flavors originally migrated across the Mediterranean. But here in Ballarò, the flavors begin to bleed into one another—the sardines in the pasta get a hit of chili, the slow-braised vegetable curry is enriched with Parmesan, the béchamel in the moussaka is lightened to better match Palermo’s steamy climate. “I’ve learned all the Sicilian classics, but I like to put my own twist on them.”
Moltivolti, where Palermo’s past and future break bread.
Michael Magers
I can tell—from the rapping of his foot on the floor, from the way his eyes never leave the table when he speaks—that he saw a lot on his road to Sicily. Too much. Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Calabria, searching for something that he found ten thousand miles from Afghanistan, in the heart of this city. “I came to Palermo because it’s open to a lot of cultures,” says Shapoor. “This is the first place I’ve found that feels like home.”
At the table next to us, a Sicilian-Gambian couple take turns spooning their baby bites of couscous. In the corner classroom, two young students rip a beatbox while the Italian teacher spits out rhymes in Sicilian. Last night Moltivolti hosted women from seven African countries cooking dishes from their respective corners of the continent—a way for them to share and give back to this city they call home, and a lesson for its denizens about the food that will shape its future.
Of course, assimilation has not been so smooth all across Italy. In response to the surge of immigration and the rise of tourism, cities have begun to enact laws “to protect tradition and Italian cultural typicality,” as one new ordinance in Verona reads. There, as in Venice, the government has banned kebab shops and other “takeaway ethnic foods.” As of 2016, seventy percent of food sold in Florence’s city center must be “local food.” Some point out that other fast-food operations have been banned as well, but the laws and the local commentary make it clear that immigrant-run restaurants pose a threat to the most sacred cultural institution of all: Italian food. Culinary nationalism is nothing new, but both the tidal wave of immigration and the enduring pride in unembellished Italian food will challenge the country’s kitchen landscape for years to come.
For the moment, Moltivolti is an outlier, a rare example of how to turn crisis into opportunity. More than a restaurant, an NGO, or a silver bullet, Moltivolti is an active conversation, one in which everyone from the college professor to the butcher to the war-hardened refugee can participate. In Palermo, those conversations always go down best at the table, surrounded by the tastes and textures that have stitched together the island’s disparate cultures for millennia.
* * *
That’s not to say you can’t, you know, do something while you’re in Palermo beyond binging. You can tour the city’s magnificent churches and museums—from the grand mosaics and golden walls of Cappella Palatina to the jumble of arches and angles and foreign influences reflected in the central cathedral—and make a down payment on the gluttony Palermo is sure to provoke. You can retreat to the shores on either side of town, to posh places such as Mondello, where the mentholated waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea will accept your bloated body without judgment, just as they do their Sicilian sons and daughters. You can take in a show at Teatro Massimo, as Michael Corleone did at the end of the Godfather trilogy, and hope that your night goes a bit better than his did.
You can seek out market life in the morning and death in the afternoon. At the Catacombe dei Cappuccini, you’ll find eight thousand corpses fully dressed, some disconcertingly well preserved, their final thoughts still reflected in their faces. What began as a traditional burial ground for friars in the sixteenth century soon turned into a status symbol for wealthy Sicilians who learned of the catacomb’s uncanny ability to preserve bodies; the two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo, the last body to be buried here ninety-two years ago, looks as though she just lay down for a nap.
For a more contemporary reminder of the tragedies trapped within this city, look to the memorials for those who have given their lives fighting the Mafia: one, a sleek black marble column in central Palermo for all of those who have died, the other, just outside of town in Capaci, for one man, Judge Giovanni Falcone, the patron saint of the anti-Mafia movement, who dealt a critical blow to organized crime in Sicily during the Maxi trials of the 1980s. (He operated alongside Orlando, but the two fell out after Orlando made claims about Falcone’s collusion with the Mafia.) Falcone traveled with three bodyguards and talked openly about his imminent death; Salvatore “Totò” Riina, a ruthless mob boss, was all too happy to oblige. Riina had a half-ton bomb planted on the highway outside Palermo, which blew Falcone, his bodyguards, and his wife out of existence.
In the months and years to follow, the murders of Falcone and his fellow crusader Paolo Borsellino served to galvanize Sicilians, turning popular sentiment against the often romanticized thugs and murderers of the mob—a reminder that even death has a certain vitality in this town.
Of course, the whole damn island of Sicily is a treasure trove of discoveries, both natural and man-made. Coastal enclaves—Cefalù, Taormina, Siracusa—lay claim to some of Italy’s most potent combination of pristine seascape, staggering history, and superlative seafood. On the slopes of Mount Etna, some of Italy’s most talented winemakers produce potions of vexing deliciousness. Mountain towns such as Ragusa and Noto will break you with their beauty, their hospitality, their perfect little restaurants. From the ancient chocolate traditions of Modica to the magnificent mezze-and-couscous culture of Trapani to Catania’s late-night street feasts of grilled horse and bad decisions, a road trip around the island will leave you love struck for Sicilia.
But as much as I long to venture out across this majestic island, it’s hard to escape Palermo’s gravitational pull. To fall under the city’s spell, you don’t need a car, a map, or even much of a plan. You just need to move your feet. In the waning moments of the afternoon, light splinters its way through every orifice in the old part, shooting through cracks, bending around corners, slipping through the great stone arches at the edge of the port. Follow the light and see where it leads you.
It will take you past a street corner where men gather to eat simmered offal from clandestine street carts. (Don’t fill up before dinner!) Past the window of a workshop on Via IV Aprile, where inside an old man with wild hair whittles wood into magnificent little toys. (NO PICTURES! an exasperated sign reminds you.) On to Via Alessandro Paternostro, to places such as Bar Salvatore, where people fill the streets in the early hours of the evening for an aperitivo, that much-beloved Italian way to warm up for dinner with free bar snacks and booze. (Make it a spritz: prosecco, Aperol, and soda water, the closest thing to a Sicilian sunset in a glass.)
It’s not all postcard pretty, of course. Much of Palermo can feel like an archaeological dig suddenly suspended: ancient buildings roped off and abandoned, corridors of plywood that stretch on without meaning. On the street corners of even the nicest parts of the city’s historic district, you’ll find garbage stacked up in mountains of stench and decay—a by-product of southern Italy’s penchant for strikes, labor disputes, and Mafia mischief making. When I walked by one such prodigious pile on Via Butera, one of Palermo’s most elegant streets, and snapped a photo, a man in an apron came out of the corner bar and barked at me, “Great, there you go! A beautiful memory of Palermo!”
By now you probably need another drink. If you’re up past midnight and thirsty, you’ll find your way to the Vucciria—a small piazza with a few snaking tributaries where the city funnels its hungriest and thirstiest citizens. During the day, when the Vucciria Market stalls line the streets, pushing everything from swordfish to Grana Padano to fake Prada, you can slip in to Taverna Azzurra, sip a €1 glass of marsala from the bodega barrel and listen to the old men talk about Silvio Berlusconi and Serie A in a language no other Italians would understand. (Sicilians—palermitani in particular—speak a dialect that bears only a passing resemblance to the language spoken on the mainland.)
But on a weekend night you’ll find the piazza transformed into a pulsating street party. Grills set up around the sunken piazza sizzle with the scent of stigghiola, goat or lamb intestines wrapped around leeks and cooked until they crackle. Music pulses from parts unknown. There is no apparent order: drinks appear magically, music arrives from sources unknown, and smoke, a mixture of charred crustaceans and African hash, hangs thick in the air as throngs of young, drunk palermitani and a few lucky visitors push the night until it buckles.
* * *
“Palermo is changing. You can see it everywhere,” says Nicoletta Polo Lanza Tomasi, the duchess of Palma. We’re sitting in the patio gardens of the seventeenth-century Palazzo Lanza Tomasi, the former palace of Giuseppe di Lampedusa. He lived upstairs in the 1950s as he went from café to café in Palermo, stitching together the scenes that would finally become one of the great masterpieces of Sicilian literature, The Leopard.
He would not live to see it published. In fact, just days before succumbing to a tumor on his lung in the spring of 1957, he received his latest rejection letter from the Italian publishing world, a final injustice in a life that had accumulated more than a few as it ground to a halt. He had left his beloved Palermo for Rome, hoping for a cure that would never come. Before setting off for his deathbed to the north, he left a letter to Gioacchino Lanza di Assaro, a distant cousin who had grown so close to Lampedusa in his later years that he had been adopted as his son. He knew his days were numbered:
My dearest Giò,
I am anxious that, even with the curtain down, my voice should reach you to convey to you how grateful I am for the comfort your presence has brought me these last two or three years of my life which have been so painful and somber but which would have been quite simply tragic were it not for you.
Michael Magers
He goes on to implore dear Giò to find a publisher, a desire echoed in his tersely worded will (“Needless to say, this does not mean having it published at my heirs’ expense; I should consider this a gross humiliation”). Giò did just that; a few months after Lampedusa’s death, Feltrinelli Editore in Milan bought the manuscript—and the rights to one of the best-selling novels in Italian history.
For anyone looking to better understand Italy before it was Italy (and Sicily before it was part of Italy), The Leopard could be your history book. Set in southern Italy in 1860, in the final throes of the revolution that eventually unified the disparate city-states into the Kingdom of Italy, it grapples with crumbling order, class warfare, and the challenges of a world on the verge of irreversible change. The novel’s eventual hero, the dashing liberal Tancredi, is based on none other than Gioacchino himself.
Back then, Gioacchino was one of Palermo’s most promising young men—of a respected family, fiercely intelligent, a rising talent in the world of classical music. In 1972, he was named the director of Teatro Massimo, and eventually he went on to run many of Italy’s most important opera houses (Rome, Bologna, Naples), as well as the Italian Cultural Institute in New York.
Like most of Palermo’s upper class, he left Sicily for the better part of four decades, but in the 1980s, Gioacchino returned with his wife, Nicoletta Polo, and the duke and duchess set about restoring Lampedusa’s port-side palazzo, bombed by the Allies in 1943, to its former glory, including converting the extra apartments downstairs into Butera 28, one of Palermo’s finest accommodations.
“Thirty years ago, when I arrived, Palermo looked as if the war had just finished,” the duchess tells me over afternoon tea in the garden. “Most people had moved into the new part of town. The old part was abandoned. Now we’re seeing the rebirth of the historic center. Architects, artists, contractors are all buying and refurbishing this area.”
It makes for a great story, one you’ve probably heard before: an ancient city fallen into disrepair suddenly rising like a phoenix from the ashes of its former self. Sounds lovely, but no narrative in Palermo is ever so linear. Change is under way here, as it is everywhere, but traditions die hard: the offal still simmers, the old couples still shuffle over the cobblestones, the trash still builds up in impossible piles. If there is one striking change to Palermo, it’s the one Mayor Orlando heralds: Ballarò and the blooming of an immigrant nation.
The duke is less optimistic in his assessment of the city. I climb the stairs to see Gioacchino one evening around midnight. Whiskey in hand, he shows me the art gallery and library, the penciled Picasso sketch of his mother (“one of the most beautiful women in Palermo”), and, of course, the original manuscript of The Leopard, now kept in a glass case with its own lighting system. I tell the duke I’m rereading the novel, inspired by my stay in one of the downstairs apartments. He smiles broadly. “It is a magnificent work, isn’t it?” He says it with the emotion of someone who keeps it on his nightstand. “Remember, it’s not a historical novel, it’s a psychological one.”
The conversation turns toward the city buzzing down below. “The man has lost his wit,” he says about the mayor and his more grandiose visions of a new Palermo. “We are in a moment of great change. Italians don’t want to be peasants anymore. Tourism one day will be the great business of Palermo, but not now. Not yet. The old city is still abandoned.”
The duke tells me that 250,000 people once lived in Palermo’s centro storico. Today, even with the recent uptick, that number is closer to 25,000, and most of those are immigrants. For the duke, much of the challenge starts with a lack of deep-pocketed citizens who could fuel a revival. “Many of the rich left. They went to Manhattan to buy real estate. That’s why we’re left without an upper class.”
We step out into the warm, sticky humidity of the Sicilian summer. The upstairs palace terrace overlooks the gardens below and, below them, the line of trattorie and gelato shops that runs adjacent to the port. And beyond them, the Mediterranean and the bobbing lights of fishing boats and merchant ships trafficking these waters. I imagine one of them to be an official vessel dispatched from Lampedusa, filled with the latest cast of anxious migrants blinking expectantly into the night as the lights of the city grow brighter.
The duke and duchess of Palma.
Michael Magers
We stand there, covered in sweat, talking quietly under the din of passing traffic, as if sharing state secrets, uncertain when to call it a night.
“I hope he can get it together,” he says after a long silence, referring to Orlando. “There’s so much work to be done.”
Just what that work is depends on where you’re standing: on a blanket in Ballarò or above the palace gardens? That’s the thing about Palermo; its beauty bends to the eye of the beholder. What is it: a hobbled old man or a wise and elegant matron? a broken promise or a dream still in the making?
Or both?
Lampedusa saw this coming decades ago, immortalizing the central paradox of Palermo in The Leopard’s most famous line, spoken by the brave Tancredi, the character the duke himself inspired:
Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi.
If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.