Palermo – Charisma, chaos and an enduring connection to the past in Sicily

The Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi occupies two sides of a piazza, as well as several adjoining streets, deep in the heart of the Kalsa quarter of Palermo. When I rang the bell, a uniformed butler opened the colossal door and ushered me up a double staircase past the stone bowls of water in which, had I been arriving at night sometime in the 18th century, I could extinguish my torch. At the top, the Principessa Carine Vanni Calvello Mantegna di Gangi was waiting to guide me round one of Italy’s grandest palaces.

Palermo is a stage set, a theatrical confusion of ornate façades and crumbling backstreets. The city could provide the setting for a 1930s gangster thriller, a medieval fantasy with secret codes and evil monks, a bodice-ripping romance or a contemporary film noir. But for all the intricate cloisters, chaotic markets and grand sea terraces, Palermo’s narratives are really more about characters than scenery. Round every corner, you stumble into remarkable people. The city is a hothouse for personalities. Visit Paris and you meet no one, except possibly other tourists. Come to Palermo and your phone is suddenly full of new Sicilian friends. The city opens its arms and pulls you onto its stage. It wants to make you part of the story.

In the palazzo, the Principessa, who seemed too young and chic for this antique place, led me through the Fencing Room, the Music Room, the Red Room, the Green Room, the Conversation Room and the Suicide Room – so named for a painting of Cleopatra clutching her asp. When I asked how many rooms there were, she shrugged. If you know how many rooms there are, she said, it is not really a palace. We carried on past a dinner service for 100 people, a cabinet made for a Mughal emperor and several chandeliers the size of trucks, before arriving in the ballroom, the Galleria degli Specchi, or the Gallery of Mirrors.

The room is famous. It is the setting for the ballroom scene, lasting 44 cinematic minutes, in the 1960s film of Sicily’s great novel, The Leopard. Here Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale waltzed beneath a ceiling swarming with cherubs, with the growing sense that their antique world was vanishing. The Principessa felt the same. Out on the terrace she shared her anxieties about this building, with its challenging issues of maintenance, mounting taxes and government indifference.

Suddenly she wasn’t a privileged princess but an individual, worried, emotional, heroic in her determination to see things through. This is Palermo, I thought. I had come for a palace, but had found a person.

Set around a glittering bay, framed by the mountain backdrop known as the Conca d’Oro, the Golden Conch, Palermo is the most adorable and underrated city in Italy. It is a place of great swagger and humble intimacies; charming, chaotic, irrepressible and beautiful. It has none of the calculated studied vibe that makes some Italian cities seem like museums. It refuses to be gentrified. Palermo is as untidy as life, and as temperamental as a Sicilian lover. There is a vulnerability about this sweet city – its past troubles, its shabby side streets, its relative lack of resources – and vulnerability is always so seductive. I would rather spend a day here than a week in smug, well-ordered Florence.

If Palermo feels old, if there is sometimes a world-weariness, it could be because she has had to put up with such a long line of faithless suitors whose heads have been turned by her plump lemons. The city’s first colonisers were the Phoenicians, a thousand years before Christ. They were followed by the Greeks, the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Goths, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Hohenstaufens, the Angevins, the Aragonese, the Habsburgs, the Bourbons. The most unlikely of Sicily’s conquerors were the Normans: the island owes them as much as England does. They came south in the 11th century, possibly hoping to escape another wet winter on the South Downs. I like to imagine them sending breathless postcards to their cousins in Britannia, about the sun, the wine, the pleasure palaces and the lemons, perhaps with a PS about a gorgeous Sicilian girl.

In the Ballarò market, the sun beat down on red awnings, suffusing the whole odorous street with a rust-coloured light. Every morning, I bought ripe peaches and fresh figs from the same stall. It became a friendship. The vendor spotted me and called his sing-song welcome, “Hey, English, your peaches are waiting. I have saved you the best figs.” He was probably overcharging me, but he threw in advice for free. “Go to Monreale, naturalmente,” he said, referring to the cathedral on the ridge above Palermo. “But if you want to understand the city, go to the Zisa. An Arab palace like a labyrinth, full of secrets.” Only in Palermo are greengrocers also passionate architectural historians.

In a piazza round the corner from the Palazzo Gangi, I met Liborio, the burly proprietor of Bar Timi, sitting with his friends, who happily doubled as his customers, at the three tables outside on the cobbles. He was appalled by my order of an Aperol Spritz. “No, ti prego,” he cried, lifting his eyes to heaven. “This is a drink for tourists. Wait, I will bring you a white wine from the slopes of Mount Etna. It is made with fresh air, sun and wind. And Carricante grapes of course. They have been growing them there for a thousand years. This wine will change your life, make you a better person.” And I think it probably did, at least for that sudden Sicilian moment, laughing and tasting with Liborio.

Across town, in the catacombs of the Capuchin Monastery, I called in on the dead. Beneath the monastery, steps lead down into a macabre mass grave of citizens who could afford a process of mummification that the monks invented in the 17th century. Suspended on the walls of long underground passageways are more than 9,000 of the city’s former residents, dressed in their Sunday best, carefully divided by rank, gender and occupation. In the women’s passages, there is even a section for virgins. After a couple of centuries, not all the residents are looking their best, although in some cases, the mummification has been a remarkable success; I know living people who don’t look this chipper. On the way out, the monk at the door, perhaps noticing my startled expression, shrugged, describing it as “a carnival of the dead”.

On a balcony in Piazza Giuseppe Verdi I joined a group of new Sicilian friends: the architect, the designer and the DJ. It was a jolly party. Everyone talked at once, drank prosecco, gossiped about friends’ liaisons and argued about where to go for dinner. “Embellishments,” the architect said, as she held out her glass. “That is Palermo – opera houses, palaces, love affairs, lies, everything must be embellished.”

The balcony overlooked the Teatro Massimo, Palermo’s opera house, the third largest in Europe after Paris’s and Vienna’s, and a galleon of a building moored at the centre of the city. People liked to say that opera flourished in Palermo because of the Mafia. Apparently, Mafia dons loved nothing more than an evening in a private box dabbing their eyes through Madama Butterfly. Miss Yaya, the DJ, was pure Palermo: stylish, passionate, edgy. As with the city, you never knew quite what to expect: bittersweet melancholy or vibrant energy. The next day I found her in Vucciria market, her decks set up among the courgettes and plum tomatoes, happily playing to the packed outdoor tables of Osteria Dadalìa. Waiters hustled back and forth with foaming bottles of beer, diners abandoned their pasta con le sarde to jive in the narrow alley with passers-by while the greengrocer nodded with the beat while weighing out half a kilo of artichokes for an elderly gentleman.

After her set, Miss Yaya and I went to find an artist friend. A rattling lift took us up through the echoing stairwell of another crumbling palace to the top floor and the studio of Edoardo Dionea Cicconi. A conceptual artist who works with light and sound, marrying ideas of art and science, Cicconi came to Palermo from Rome. The city was a revelation, he said. Palermo remains resolutely itself. It does not compromise.

Cicconi threw open the windows of his studio to the sudden view of the cathedral across the street. Built by the Normans in the 12th century, inspired by the Arabs, with embellishments from the Byzantines, it is architectural chaos: ziggurat crenellations, majolica cupolas, geometric patterns, gothic arches, a Catalan portico, a neoclassical dome, columns carved with passages of the Koran. It is an artwork, Cicconi smiled, on a theme of time; all the centuries of Palermo, bundled together in stone. Among the royal tombs is that of Henry VI, a German king, who by 1194 was King of Sicily. When they opened his tomb, they found him, blond-haired, wearing his crown, dressed in Arab clothes. Palermo is no provincial backwater. For millennia the city has been central to a sprawling cosmopolitan world.

Another day in the Piazza Bellini, where boys were thumping a football against a bit of ancient Roman wall, I stepped into the church of Santa Caterina d’Alessandria, whose interior is such a swirling tumult of baroque embellishments that there is a danger of seasickness. From a side door, I climbed long staircases to the roof spaces where nuns from the adjoining convent watched the mass from behind metal screens. They kneeled, their faces shadows behind the mesh, high up among plaster angels. In a corner sat an elderly woman, her fingers coiled into the metal mesh. “My grandmother was a nun here,” she said, without explanation. Not all nuns were devout brides of Christ. A couple of centuries ago part of a convent’s population consisted of “fallen women”. With their reputations besmirched, their families despaired of finding them a suitor. Some people said the screens enclosing the high gallery were to stop young nuns, incarcerated against their will, throwing themselves to their deaths. “You must have a pastry,” the woman said suddenly. “They are the taste of my childhood. My grandmother knew all the convent recipes. She used to say it was the happiest moment of her day, when they were allowed a torte di ricotta in the courtyard.”

The convent is closed now – you can look through the melancholic single bedrooms and the prayer chapel – but the pastries have survived. In a corner of the courtyard, I Segreti del Chiostro, The Secrets of the Cloister, sells baked goods still made with the nun’s secret recipes. I had a torte di ricotta sitting there under an orange tree, the place fragrant with old roses, and thought of the young woman who sat here more than a century ago.

These days there is a spirited renaissance in Palermo that the Normans would have admired, an entrepreneurial buzz as the city reinvents itself. Sicilians, as well as other Italians, are discovering Palermo. Its opportunities – lower rents, unrestored buildings, a plethora of tempting palaces, the sense of authenticity – has made it a magnet for start-ups. Young chefs have opened cool restaurants exploiting Sicily’s rich palette of ingredients. Contemporary galleries showcase artists from the island. Bookshops, trendy bars and designer boutiques are all now part of its commercial landscape. It is not gentrification, just new ideas fitting into Palermo’s wonderful chaos.

Opposite the Palazzo Gangi is the sprawling complex of Sant’Anna la Misericordia, whose 15th-century palazzo, collapsing through much of the 20th century, its exquisite courtyard used as a car park, has been reborn in the 21st century as GAM, the Gallery of Modern Art. In the Via Vittorio Emanuele, I called in on the 18th-century Palazzo Riso, bombed in the Second World War, abandoned for decades and brought back to life as the Contemporary Art Museum of Sicily. The old palace is almost more interesting than its edgy conceptual exhibits, those grand rooms, stripped of their baroque decoration to reveal the bare bones beneath.

When Goethe came to Sicily, he believed it was the key to understanding Italy. But Goethe was wrong. When Garibaldi landed on its shores, more than 70 years after Goethe, to make the island part of the new unified Italy, he was just another conqueror. Crowds turned out to appease the new ruler. Some historians claim they shouted “Viva Talia”, rather than “Italia”, believing Talia was the name of some new queen who they should now revere. It was a measure of their separateness from what Sicilians sometimes still call “the continent”.

I had dinner in a backstreet trattoria somewhere. Cats were patrolling the darkness between pools of street lights. Nearby, a woman was shouting something from a window. A friend was pouring the Etna wine that I was now recommending to everyone. “I don’t know who we are really: Middle Eastern, North African, some hybrid race,” he said with a shrug. “But, really, we are only pretending to be Italians.”