Day 41 - Palermo

# Campari & Soda: 0, # Gelati: 1

The weather was lovely today.  Clear, blue skies and mild temperatures (a top of about 22C).   

I started my day with a tour of the Palazzo Conte Frederico.   This is the home of the family of Count Alessandro Frederico.  The family still lives there but makes money by offering tours and renting out rooms.   The younger son gave my tour in both Italian and English.  I understood a good 70% of the Italian version which pleased me greatly.

The palazzo is amazing.  Originally Palermo was built on a peninsula with a wall with towers (12th century) all around.   They have since filled in the land on either side and most of the towers have been demolished.   However, the Frederico family bought the tower (in yellow) in the 16th century (I think) and built their palazzo around it so it is the only one that is still intact.

The Frederico family got their name as they are the descendents of an illegitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II.  At least I think that was what we were told.  The English version of the tour was shorter than the Italian version.  The family have been living there since the 16th century.  The current count has two sons, both in their 40s.  Neither are married and they have no children.  I am sure they are sick to death of being asked those questions.

The tour took us through the formal rooms and up to the top of the tower.  There is a kitchen up there.  Apparently, that was where they put them back in the 12th century.  It meant the heat and smells could escape upwards and instead into the rooms where the family lived.  It was also safer in case of fires.  The original kitchen has been renovated many times over the years.  It even has had gas put in.  Under each of the those four pots is a gas burner.  Just out of shot is a woodfired pizza oven, which they still occasionally use.

While most of the tour was of formal rooms (you can have functions there) we also got to see some of the rooms the family uses to this day.  Not only do they have priceless objects from the past several hundred years, they also have important items of furniture too.

I went for an amble after visiting the Palazzo and stumbled across yet another market.  While there were several stalls with tourist souvenirs most stalls were for fruit & veg or fish.  Clearly, all the markets I've been to are where the locals do their grocery shopping.  

I randomly chose a place nearby for lunch, the Caffè del Kassaro.  Unlike all the places I've been to before claiming to serve traditional Sicilian food, this one really did.  A good half the customers were locals who had just ducked in for a quick plate of pasta for lunch.  The service was brusque and the menus all in Italian.  I had an extremely decent pizza.

After lunch I went to the Palazzo Reale.  Only a small part of this is open to the public.  There was a very interesting tour of the various bits of city walls that have been found underneath the building.  The earliest parts date from the 4th century BC!  There is a chapel, the Cappella Palatina, with mosaics that would have been impressive if I hadn't seen the ones in Ravenna already and the Royal Gardens, where I spotted this plant.

It's a little far from home I think.  There is also a hall with changing exhibits.  The signs outside all talked about an exhibition about women who made history, which I would have liked to see.  However, either it is coming or has just been, because what was on display was modern art by an artist I had never heard off.  His works were either plaster replicas of Greek or Roman statues (which I belive he bought rather than made himself) on which he had dribbled paint or else large canvases which he had "painted" by dipping boxing gloves in paint and then punching the canvas.   In Vanessa's immortal phrase "I don't believe I was able to appreciate his work".

After failing at art appreciation I left and bought an excellent gelati and ambled down towards the sea.  I had meant to walk along the shore for a bit, however just outside the city gate is a very busy road that goes around the city centre.  Crossing roads in Palermo is not fun.  They aren't very keen on traffic lights, they just have zebra crossings.  The trick is to wait for a gap in traffic.  Not one that is big enough to safely cross, just one that is big enough to give the driver time to slow down.  You then march out across the road, making it clear from your body language that you expect them to stop.  As you can imagine I have spent most of my time here in the ZTL zone where the roads are very narrow and there is little traffic or in the pedestrian-only areas.  I certainly didn't make it to the sea shore.

For dinner I didn't bother trying to find somewhere "authentic".  I have to pack and psych myself up for hiking again tomorrow.  I went to a place called Pastando.  I'm not sure if it is part of a chain or wants to become a chain.  In any case, it doesn't pretend to be a serious restaurant.  It only serves pasta.  More importantly, you pick your sauce and then you pick which pasta shape you want, which is all wrong!  Serious Italian foodies would only ever pair certain types of sauces with certain shapes of pasta.  Still my meal was good.  I chose a sauce of sundried tomato pesto with ricotta on caserecce, which was a much better  meal than the one I had last night.  I also noticed that they had carbonara sauce with the correct ingredients - guanciale and NO cream, which also puts them one up on last night's trattoria.  Their tiramisu was decent too.   A solid 7/10.

On the way back to my hotel I saw this parked behind the opera house.  Why?