Arriving in Palermo

Historic Center of Palermo

I had arrived in Palermo on an overnight ferry from Napoli. It was an easy walk from the ferry port to where I would stay. Out through the gate into the port area, turn left and walk south on Via Francesco Crispi, probably auto-labeled as SS113 on the below map.

I would be staying in the Kalsa or Halisah quarter of the historic center of Palermo, where the Fatimid Emir once had his palace. All the things I wanted to see were within walking distance. The train station was even closer than the ferry port.

The Allies heavily bombed the port area during World War II, you can see the straight streets and relatively large blocks just inland from the port. Less damaged sections of the old city close to where I stayed retained their narrow, twisting streets.

To My Accommodations

After the final collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire took control of Sicily in 535.

Arab forces of the Fatimid Caliphate first landed on Sicily in 827, seized Palermo in 831, and within 50 years had taken control of the entire island. Palermo became al-Madinah or "The City", known as "the city of a thousand mosques". It was the capital of an emirate and a rival to Cairo and Cordoba in splendor. The Arabs brought skilled craftsmen, both Jewish and Muslim.

The Normans were Norse adventurers who had raided and then settled northern France. They first arrived in Sicily in 1060, and by 1091 they controlled the entire island. The Normans immediately adapted to Sicily's established mix of Greek, Latin, Arab, and Jewish traditions and customs.

Literal signs of Palermo's past remain in the Kalsa quarter. Several street signs list the street names in Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic.

I had a reservation at a guesthouse calling itself La Dimora del Marchese Notarbartolo, the Residence of the Marquis Notarbartolo, at #145 Via Alloro. I had gone through the listings at Booking.com ordered by cheapest first, looking for locations in the Kalso quarter. I found the place I wanted to stay, but didn't get around to pasting the long guesthouse name into Google Translate until later. Here's the building I found:

It literally was an 18th century palace, the Palazzo Cannitello.

The Notarbartolos were one of the most prominent families of Sicilian nobility. Emanuele Notarbartolo (1834-1893) was the Marquis of San Giovanni. He was involved in Giuseppe Garibaldi's "Expedition of the Thousand" in 1860, an early stage of Risorgimento, the unification of Italy that established the Kingdom of Italy in 1870.

That led to him serving as the assessor of Palermo's police force, then president of the civic hospital. In 1873, he was elected mayor. He had built a reputation for moral integrity, and that led to the national government appointing him as Director General of Banco di Sicilia in 1876, asking him to straighten out the banking system island-wide.

The bank managers in Sicily were granting large loans on the basis of patronage, with generous repayment terms including no guarantee of repayment. Powerful people in Palermo, both politicians and criminals, had become accustomed to the system. But the Bank of Sicily was in danger of bankruptcy.

Notarbartolo cracked down on the bank's practice of large unsecured loans. That angered the politicians and criminals. They kidnapped Notarbartolo in 1882, but a ransom was paid, he was released, and he immediately went back to enforcing bank regulations.

While traveling by train in 1893, Notarbartolo was stabbed to death. His killers were Matteo Filippello and Giuseppe Fontana, two men belonging to to the Sicilian Mafia, La Cosa Nostra or "Our Thing" as they call it.

Fontana was a boss of the Villabate Mafia clan. Filippello had been a political rival of Notarbartolo and a fellow member of Banco di Sicilia's board of directors. The killers were initially sentenced to prison, but the legal process broke down and they were released.

Before this, Mafia members routinely murdered other mafiosi. But Notarbartolo is seen as the first politician or other public figure killed on Mafia orders. The first of many.

I had a set of two keys. The first one unlocked the person-sized door within one of the large pair of doors at the street. When headed back out, it had the same electric lock system I saw at several other locations during my trip. Use your left hand, press the red button with your thumb, and pull the black handle. The flexible conduit allows residents to remotely unlock the door.

The large outer door led into an interior court open to the sky. Multiple staircases led up from here. My accommodations were up the red staircase on the left.

Two floors up I reached the iron door and used the second key.

This really was a palazzo! Wow!

There were private bedrooms and some shared space.

All this for just € 34 per night, what a deal. There was even il Cane del Palazzo, the Palace Dog!

Dog, not doge, those were the leaders or rulers of the Republic of Venice.

Around the Neighborhood — Sant'Anna la Misericordia

I headed out to explore the neighborhood. I had passed Chiesa Sant'Anna la Misericordia, the Church of Saint Anne Mercy, just two blocks from where I was staying. I would return there to start my sightseeing.

A 16th century record documents the presence here of a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Pity.

The district's population grew beyond what the chapel could support. The city authorities asked for donations from the noble families to support its replacement. Construction continued from 1606 to 1632, and the church was consecrated in 1639, dedicated to Saint Anne, mother of Mary.

The first chapel on the right has statues of Anne and Mary.

The church has a simple Romanesque architecture— a rectangular central apse and ceilings that are half cylinders. The decoration, though, is Baroque and intricate.

I liked the lighting in the left apse. 100% intensity, 100% saturation, with the hue rotating through the colors. Above, I caught it at purple.

Façade of Chiesa San Niccolò da Tolentino.

Around the Neighborhood — San Niccolò da Tolentino

Chiesa San Niccolò da Tolentino or the Church of Saint Nicholas of, um, Little Tolento or similar, is at #157 Via Maqueda. That's a relatively narrow yet significant street through the historic center. It crosses Corso Vittorio Emanuele at Quattro Canti, an intersection considered the center of the historic district.

There once was a synagogue where San Niccolò da Tolentino now stands. In 1492, King Ferdinand of Spain expelled all Jews from lands under the crown of Aragon. At the time, that included Sicily. The Jewish community sold the site to a local non-Jewish family. In 1507, a small Christian monastery was founded here.

An Augustinian community took over, building this church in 1603–1609. It has a basilica plan, with columns and arches dividing the central nave from flanking aisles with lower ceilings. The church suffered damages in earthquakes, and underwent major reconstructions in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The lateral aisles open to individual chapels.

Around the Neighborhood

Now some random pictures from the area around where I stayed. This is Chiesa di Sant' Maria di Agonizzanti, or the Church of Saint Mary of the Dying.

Corso Vittorio Emanuele west from Quattro Canti is the stereotypical tourist street with foreign tourists trudging along in large and small groups. However, side streets closer to where I stayed in the Kalsa quarter have places where the locals go for an aperitivo.

It's reverse flâerie, sitting with a beverage and watching the world walk past.

An English-language copy of the Book of Mormon had been abandoned on a shelf below a street corner ceramic shrine to Holy Mary of the Mercy. I also saw some determined Jehovah's Witnesses stationing themselves daily at the madhouse of Quattro Canti. They had Italian-language material, but attracted little interest.

In French, la carte is the printed list of available dishes, while le menu usually means a set meal of multiple courses.

In Italian, the list of dishes is il menù. However, menù can also be a multi-course set meal. Be careful when casually asking for the menu.

Above and below are a menù lunch I got one day at Osteria Dalla Terra Alla Tavola, the "From the Land to the Table Restaurant". It was close to where I was staying, just off the large and busy Via Roma at Via Firenze 4/6. The meal started with an antipasto plate. Various fish, zucchini, peppers, eggplant, and olives.

Then my choice from the primo or first course pasta dishes, tuna and cherry tomatos with spaghetti.

Now, a full Italian meal would then go from the primo into the secundo, a second course meat-and-vegetables plate. That's a ridiculous amount of food, two full meals following a meal-sized appetizer or starter, followed by dessert. Antipasti and primo was always more than enough for me.

After my primo dish of pasta, dessert was cannoli, a Sicilian pastry made from a tube-shaped shell of fried dough filled with a creamy and sweet filling containing ricotta cheese. Arabs brought many baking techniques and sweet foods, along with spices, to the Emirate of Sicily.

Dessert was accompanied by amaro, which is Italian for "bitter". Amaro is an herbal liqueur commonly consumed as an after-dinner digestivo. There are dozens of varieties.

In Italy, the mid-day meal is typically the large meal, and a siesta frequently follows. Dinner is lighter, and doesn't start until well into the evening. After this meal I had a siesta and then nothing but an aperitivo around dinner time.

Into the Souq

Consider Palermo's location and history. Of course Palermo has excellent markets!

Mercato Ballarò is a short distance north and west of the Palermo Centrale train station.

One day I got breakfast — cornetto e doppio caffè — at a cafe near the station. Walking north from there along Via Maqueda, I soon spotted a passage through a building that led into the souq.

Through that archway and continue along the street, follow the smoke and delicious smells from grills.

A wide variety of fresh seafood was available.

Also, colorful fruit and vegetables.

This was not at all my first Mediterranean bazaar, but the meter-plus-long vegetables puzzled me.

My innkeeper back at the Residence of the Marquis Notarbartolo was able to explain this to me. Yes, just as the sign says, these are surprisingly large zucchini.

Several vendors offered what I expect of zucchini — dark green with lighter speckles, about 20–30 cm long. These pale green monsters, however, are a Sicilian variety especially prized for soup.

Armed with that information at the start of my near-circumnavigation of Sicily — onward through Milazzo, Vulcano, Stromboli, Messina, Taormina, Siracusa, and Agrigento — I watched for zucchini soup on menus but found none. Obviously I need to return to Sicily and extend my search!

The Arabic line on the street signs seemed most appropriate in the souq.

After quite a bit of wandering through the souq, it was time to start thinking about lunch. The cruise ship groups had been marched through the market in the morning, and now had been directed off to wherever their lunch was served. I would have my lunch in the market with the locals.

Given the small size of the cans, I forget how large tuna really are.

I chose one of several seafood-focused restaurants.

Mezzo litro di vino bianco, per favore. A half liter of white wine, please. No half-liter carafes for the cheap house wine here, they pour it into large mugs.

I had the pasta with swordfish. Pesce spada con spaghetti.

Octopus with spaghetti is, of course, pastapus, or at least it should be.

Rationalism and Futurism

Via Roma is a principal street through central Palermo, running north from the Palermo Centrale train station. Several buildings along Via Roma are examples of the Rationalism and Futurism artistic movements.

These overlapping architectural and artistic movements began in Italy in the early 20th century, becoming closely associated with Fascism and therefore falling out of favor along with Mussolini. But through the period of roughly 1910–1940, Rationalism and Futurism influenced Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, Art Deco, and Brutalism.

Surrealism and Dada were, largely, artistic reactions to the First World War. But they were influenced by Rationalism and Futurism. The Russian Constructivist art movement with its posters and films was founded in 1915, also influenced by Rationalism and Futurism.

There were Rationalist / Futurist architecture and interior design, as seen in buildings along Via Roma, but also film, painting, graphic design, and more, as also seen in Constructivism and other movements. Plus, there were Rationalist / Futurist music and literature, and I can't imagine exactly what forms those took.

In 1926 a group of young self-described Rationalist architects founded the so-called Gruppo 7 and published their manifesto in the magazine Rassegna Italiana:

The hallmark of the earlier avant garde was a contrived impetus and a vain, destructive fury, mingling good and bad elements: the hallmark of today's youth is a desire for lucidity and wisdom...This must be clear...we do not intend to break with tradition...The new architecture, the true architecture, should be the result of a close association between logic and rationality.

The Banco di Sicilia is one example of Futurist / Rationalist architecture along Via Roma. It's a short distance south of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, close to my guesthouse, and just across from the osteria where I had the wonderful multi-course lunch seen above.
  Banco di Sicilia
  Sede di Palermo
or
  Bank of Sicily
  Palermo Office
Was this where Emanuele Notarbartolo, the Marquis of San Giovanni, former resident at my lodging, worked before his assassination? Perhaps.

The Palazzo delle Poste at Via Roma #320 is a striking example of the Rationalist architectural style. The Rationalist, and eventually Fascist, government architect Angiolo Mazzoni designed it in the early 1920s as the mail and telegraph center for Palermo, and to some extent for Sicily in general.

The building covers 5,100 square meters, with a colonnade across its front with ten columns 30 meters tall and 3.5 meters in diameter. The structure is reinforced concrete, clad with grey marble. Mazzoni designed the entire interior in the Futurist style, included detailed designs for the copper-clad doors, the door and window handles, the lighting, and the decorative stone surfaces.

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Northern Italy had become more prosperous, but the south and Sicily had largely been neglected by the government. Palermo had only limited hospital facilities and no functioning sewer system. Local Mafia figures stepped into the vacuum to provide services, or at least protection, to local businesses and individuals.

When Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, he set about reducing the power and influence of organized crime in the south. The Fascist state must be strong, it must be perceived as strong by everyone, and providing services could be a part of that. Although, did Mussolini really make Italy's trains run on time? No, he did not. That was Fascist propaganda.

Mussolini began building infrastructure in Palermo, and this modern post and telegraph office was part of it. Construction began in 1929, and the building was opened for operation in 1934. It was a technologically advanced facility, one of the largest telegraph centers in Italy.

In 1933–1934 the Futurist painter Benedetta Cappa created "Sintesi delle Comunicazioni" or "Synthesis of Communication", a set of five murals, each 3×2 meters, done in tempera and encaustic on canvas. They depict land, sea, and air transportation, with radio and telegraphic communications. Benedetta was married to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the poet who founded the Futurist movement in 1909 with a manifesto calling for an aggressive push toward the future. So, these are canonically Futurist paintings!

Unfortunately, the paintings were installed in a conference room where only post and telecommunications officials could see them. Futurist scholars knew that they existed, but very few had actually seen them.

In 2014 the Guggenheim Museum in New York City put on a special exhibit: Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe. The museum negotiated the first-ever loan of the Futurist murals, carefully transporting them to New York and allowing the public to see them. The special show was the largest Futurist retrospective ever put on outside Italy.

Also notice the decorative stone furniture and wall covering, the large light fixture, and other Futurist furnishings designed by the architect.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: poet, editor, art theorist, author of the Manifesto of Futurism and founder of the Futurist movement, from Wikipedia.

H.P. Lovecraft referred to Futurism as depicting and designing things weirdly beyond human experience. From The Call of Cthulhu, 1928:

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing.

[...]

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing any definite structure or building, he dwells only on broad impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces—surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, and impious with horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about angles because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams. He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing at the terrible reality.

And, from At the Mountains of Madness, 1931:

Their method of design hinged on a singular juxtaposition of the cross-section with the two-dimensional silhouette, and embodied an analytical psychology beyond that of any known race of antiquity. It is useless to try to compare this art with any represented in our museums. Those who see our photographs will probably find its closest analogue in certain grotesque conceptions of the most daring futurists.

Winged figures, allegories of divine messengers, are sculpted in bas-relief above the colonnade of Palazzo delle Poste.

Above that are some antennas. At right is what I presume is a quarter-wave vertical whip above four similarly sized radial elements approximating a ground plane. The columns are of 3.5 meter diameter, so the vertical quarter-wave element is about 7–8 meters tall, meaning that the antenna is intended for use at a wavelength around 30 meters, a frequency around 10 MHz. It would be omnidirectional, approximately equal in receive sensitivity and transmit power in all directions. That could provide backup communication with reasonable coverage from Palermo throughout Italy.

At left is a log-periodic beam antenna that might cover approximately 50–1000 MHz with some directionality. A log-periodic antenna is very much a compromise, a adequate generalist but not a high-performance specialist. A purpose-built single-frequency Yagi-Uda beam would have much better performance at that one frequency. However, a log-periodic like this would function across the radio spectrum from the low end of VHF through UHF to the low end of microwaves.

The Strait of Messina between Sicily and the "toe" of the Italian peninsula is about 3 kilometers wide at the narrowest point. But there's neither a bridge nor a tunnel because a major fault runs along the centerline of the strait. The two ends of a proposed bridge or tunnel would move with respect to each other.

Fiber-optic connections run between Sicily and the Italian peninsula, and also to other countries around the Mediterranean. But the African Plate is moving beneath the Eurasian Plate, things move unpredictably and cables break. Backup radio links are a good idea.

The building underwent a long period of neglect and decay, and was seriously damaged by a fire in 1988. Now restoration work has it back to its original appearance, minus the Fascist insignias and symbols.

The Rationalist / Futurist design was vaguely familiar to me. A few years before, I had visited Leros, one of the Dodecanese islands in the eastern Aegean. Italy had controlled many of the Greek islands for centuries, the Greek island of Thera is better known by its Italian name of Santorini. Leros was still under Italian control in the early 20th century. The Italian government built an entire town in Rationalist design in 1930, a new town for the new Italian Navy base, naming it Porto Lago. Now the town is called Lakki, and it's an odd place to visit. I felt like I was in a Soviet Constructivist movie set.