PALERMO FAITH
There’s so much more to Sicily than The Godfather, as GARY STEWART discovers
ALL I really knew about Sicily before my trip was that it’s where the Godfather comes from. So, when I got the chance to visit Palermo and write about it, it was an offer er I couldn’t refuse.
We landed at Palermo airport a little after 8.30pm on a Friday and took a half-hour taxi ride to our hotel, the Principe di Villafranca, a 10-minute walk from the city centre.
It’s a boutique hotel near the attractive Giardino Inglese (English Garden) featuring colourful modern art on every wall, helpful staff with good English and a decent continental breakfast. st.
Feeling a bit tired, we asked the concierge to recommend a neighbourhood restaurant and soon found ourselves seated at Sapurito.
Being English, we quickly ordered two large beers and declined the table water – a decision met with raised eyebrows from the waiter, and mutterings from fellow diners.
We didn’t know at the time but in Italy, and Sicily in particular, you drink alcohol with your meal, and take water with it, while drinking on its own is seen as uncouth. The meal was a delight, as was each meal we sat down to that weekend.
Sicilians take food very seriously. Being a poorer part of Italy their food culture has had to be inventive but with such good local produce their “peasant food” approach to cooking is no hardship.
Our shared starter consisted of deep fried potato croquettes and cheeses, carrots and courgettes in a kind of Sicilian version of tempura batter, and chickpea flour wedges flavoured with mint. Cheap ingredients, delicious dishes.
Being in the Mediterranean fish abounds, and the excellent climate provides mouth-watering local crops including pistachios, tomatoes, almonds, and aubergines which find their way into the diet in inventive fashion.
The guide book says Sicily is the second best place to eat pizza after Naples and I saw nothing to dissuade me of this opinion.
My wife ordered a pizza with the richest tomato sauce I’ve had the pleasure of tasting, and topped with a salty local sheep’s cheese called primo sale and pine nuts. I pinched some and the taste will linger in my memory.
The next day we explored. Palermo is coming up for its 3,000th birthday and has been ruled by just about every empire that’s ever paddled the Mediterranean Sea.
One minute you’re walking past high end boutiques like Prada or Gucci, the next you’re ogling a massive domed cathedral, tourists teeming over its roof like ants, whose foundation stone was laid by some Norman stonemason circa 1100 A.D.
Palermo is weird like that – classical Italian design with centuries of pedigree gives way to crumbling 19th century tenements and concrete high rises.
We used a hop-on tourist bus (€20 per person) to take stock of the city, which is massive, and still can’t have seen that much of it.
The ancient open air markets were a highlight for me. We wandered one in particular – Capo – around the back of the Teatro Massimo, a grand opera house of which the Palermitanos are justly proud, and were assailed by the sights and smells of watermelons and lemons bursting with juices, oregano still on the sprig and giant swordfish and tuna being merrily filleted by fishmongers.
You could smell the fruit and veg from yards away, something I’ve never experienced in a British supermarket.
That night we ate at another of the medieval markets, Vucciria, well regarded for its street food. I had spaghetti in a pistachio and prawn sauce, again lovely.
It was here we saw hundreds of young Palermitanos supping lager at a tavern! Apparently they do get drunk like the English, but they do it in pokey medieval alleyways.
One local hang-out we visited more than once was Spinatto, a pleasant pavement cafe that’s been open since 1860, which I’ve heard mentioned by Rick Stein as a good place to enjoy an espresso.
Here we experimented with the local passione for apperitivo.
I had a Campari spritzer (which I found to be disgusting, but less disgusting than my wife’s Campari and soda).
This is where we also witnessed locals gulping down ounces of gelato (ice cream) all day and all night.
Seriously, they order buckets of it at midnight and eat it out of brioche buns, all while judging me for having a beer. But I can’t blame them as it’s amazing and if you don’t gorge on it while you’re there you are missing one of life’s great pleasures.
Not far from here and on our last night, I heard a Palermitano say something which summed up their attitude to food and produce.
We’d sat down to dine at a small but beautiful restaurant called Bebop.
My wife, perhaps naively, asked the owner if she had any wine that was local and nice.
The inevitable reply arrived swiftly, but not unkindly: “It’s ALL local, and it’s ALL nice.”
“If you don’t gorge on gelato while you’re there you are missing one of life’s great pleasures”