Palermo is louder and shoutier than I remember but it’s also more elegant. Well, some places are. The ones that pay their protection money that is... The others are made up of crumbling buildings, half-open to the sky, showing what’s left of their previous lives - a sink attached to a wall, speckled and torn wallpaper, a skylight....

While every paper proclaims the success of the war on cosa nostra, and the Falcone-Borsellino airport is named after two martyred antimafiosi, it seems the streets tell a different story. Where once there was organisation, now there is chaos. Clearing up the corruption has left a vaccum. Once up on a time you knew who to pay to get your building put up, your streets cleaned. Take away the centuries old rotten structure of bribery, extortion and corruption and you’re left with rotten structure on the streets. While Sicily’s politicians are doing a great job at clearing up at the top, it baroque isaac

Seems that they’ve neglected to put a structure in at the bottom that was previously offered by the antistate. What the future will bring is anyone’s guess...
While over the years I’ve changed from being addressed as ‘Signorina’ to ‘Signora’ ( I can’t work out if this is a good or bad) one that hasn’t changed is Italian TV. Still the gurning presenters with waist-length hair and Donatella-style pouts. Plunging, sequinned minidresses, that should have been banned in the ‘80s, shimmer off the arms of white suits. And that’s just the newsreaders. Talent shows, of which there are nearly as many as we have, are a whole different song and dance. The cheeky young women are everywhere.
The beauty of Palermo is the mix of Baroque and Norman architecture, sometimes not only side by side but sometimes as part of the same building. La Martorana for instance, whose 12th century triple arches house both mosaics and rich carvings. Every winding street offers up countless places to pray, sometimes one just across from another. However my own form of praying proved harder to find, though when we did settle down to some clamari, octopus (see below) or the walkway. More typical Pasta con Sarde (pasta with sardines) we found ourselves paying London prices, which often left a bitter taste.