The coffee at Bar Touring on Via Maqueda is served in a small cup that is already warm from the machine. There is no menu to consult. You stand at the counter — this is understood — and drink it in the way Sicilians have been drinking coffee since before the espresso machine was invented: fast, without ceremony, as a punctuation mark between one thing and the next. By eight in the morning the bar is already loud. By half past, it has quieted again. The city is moving.
Palermo in September is a city that has stopped performing for visitors. The August tourists have gone home. The heat is still significant — thirty degrees by noon, the light falling on the baroque facades of the centro storico at an angle that makes the stone look like it is lit from within — but the city's pace has returned to something more native, more private. The markets move at their own rhythm. The restaurants fill with Palermitans eating late and without hurry. The streets narrow into the afternoon.
The Market at Ballarò
No itinerary for Palermo should begin anywhere other than the Ballarò. It is the oldest and most insistently alive of the city's three street markets, occupying a network of narrow streets in the Albergheria quarter from before sunrise until midday, when it collapses as suddenly as it assembled. There are stalls of swordfish and tuna laid out on beds of ice that are already melting by eight. Crates of late-summer vegetables — aubergine the color of midnight, tomatoes that have been growing since June. Vendors who conduct business entirely in Sicilian dialect and whose prices are not fixed and never have been.
The correct way to move through the Ballarò is slowly, without a shopping list, and with enough cash to buy something you did not plan to buy. This is not advice about the market. It is advice about Palermo in general — a city that rewards the absence of a fixed plan more than almost any other in the Mediterranean.
To travel slowly in Palermo is to understand that the city has been filtering outside influences for two thousand years and emerging, each time, more completely itself.
The Particular Quality of the Light
There is a word Sicilians use — luce — that in the context of September in Palermo takes on a specific meaning. The light here in the late summer is not the flat white light of the height of summer. It has depth, a warmth that borders on amber, and it does something particular to the city's architecture: the Norman-Arab palaces, the baroque churches, the peeling plaster of the Vucciria quarter all seem to be made of the same substance as the light itself. Photographers know this. So do painters. So does anyone who has stood on the roof terrace of a Kalsa-district guesthouse at six in the evening and watched the light move across the dome of San Giovanni degli Eremiti.
The afternoons, which are genuinely hot, are best spent horizontal. This is not laziness. It is the city's instruction, and Palermo's instructions should be followed. A room with shuttered windows and a ceiling fan. The sound of a distant Vespa. The particular silence of a southern city at three in the afternoon, which is not silence at all but a specific frequency of urban noise that is somehow more restful than quiet.
A Single Perfect Meal
On the fourth evening, on the recommendation of a woman who ran the guesthouse and seemed faintly amused by the question, dinner was at a place with eight tables in a courtyard off Via Torremuzza, no website, no reservation system, and a handwritten menu that changed daily based on what the owner had found that morning. There was a pasta with sea urchin so fresh it tasted like the sea rather than like anything that had been caught from it. There was a whole branzino, grilled over wood, dressed with oil and nothing else. There was a Nerello Mascalese from the slopes of Etna, light-bodied and mineral and correct.
The meal lasted three hours. Nobody rushed anything. The owner brought a small glass of something cold and sweet at the end — marsala from a producer whose name was not written down — and pulled up a chair for ten minutes to talk about fishing, in a mix of Italian and Sicilian, with someone at the next table. The bill, when it came, was the kind of number that makes you feel obscurely guilty.
This is what Palermo offers in September, if you come without a fixed plan and stay long enough to let the city set the pace: meals that you will describe for years in the imprecise language of memory, mornings that smell like coffee and diesel and salt air, light that does something to architecture that no photograph adequately captures. It is not a comfortable city in the conventional sense. It is a city that gets into you, slowly, and takes a long time to leave.
