My initial interest in Sicily was related to my
teaching and writing about ancient Greek political philosophy. Sicily in
general and especially that ancient city that modern Italians call Siracusa, had
been a Greek colony, the physical proof of which are the many Greek ruins in that
city and elsewhere on the island. These ruins are what I initially had wanted
to see. However, I was soon to learn that there is much more to see than ruins on
this, the largest of the Mediterranean islands.
Indeed, Sicily was full of surprises! Among them,
that Palermo, the largest Sicilian city and its capitol, does not look anything
like what we had expected. To be explicit, Kay (my wife) and I had expected
Neapolitan-like disorder and squalor, but we found a relatively ordered city of
around one million inhabitants, with beautiful gardens, relatively non-chaotic
traffic and magnificent art and architecture. And Palermo is a good city for
walking. We walked and we walked. It was early March – still winter for Sicily –
and the city, though bereft of tourists – was very much alive in what, for us, looked
like and felt like spring.
Here we see the Baroque Quattro
Canti, a cross roads at the center of the city:
Here you have Palermo’s medieval cathedral and
Martorana Church:
It is known for its famously beautiful Byzantine
mosaics dating from the 12th century:
It is also known for its Norman-Arab cloister:
Down near the port, the ancient city wall is still
partly intact. It is just behind the wall where one finds the palace once
inhabited by the last Prince of Sicily, made famous in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s
1958 novel ‘The Leopard’, set in pre-unification nineteenth century Sicily.
The story is about the old order gradually metamorphosing into the new order, eventually
marking the ascending rule of Sicilian Mafia, the Costa Nostra.
As far as we know this is the closest we got to the
Mafia. Here we see the Palermo Opera House, where, in the movie ‘the Godfather
III’, Al Piceno’s character, Michael Corleone was shot dead on its great
expanse of steps.
