Day 16 – Sicily: 24 hours in Palermo

Hasta Luego Barcelona! You were a cool city, but being sick the whole time, especially in a city destination wasn’t very fun. I look forward to returning one day, especially when the Sagrada Familia is complete and hopefully in a much healthier state. I was ready to catch our next flight and hoped that the fresh Sicilian air would cure me.

We landed in Palermo at 1pm, our bags were out in less than 5 minutes and by 2pm had our rental car and were ready to roll! We were given a cute bright blue Renault Clio for our tour di Sicily. The 30 minute drive to our hotel was quite the adventure. Stelios said driving in Palermo was worse than driving in New York City, and mind you he grew up in Queens, NY. Regardless he was very careful and did a great job getting us to our destination. 

At first driving through Palermo it looked like a s***hole if I’m being honest. Luckily, as we approached our hotel it was in a much nicer area near a plaza with lots of cute restaurants and right across from the Massimo theatre. We checked into the Palazzao Sovrana which I booked through Expedia, however upon meeting the host at check in it was not actually a hotel but instead a luxury apartment building. I found that odd since it was listed as a hotel on Expedia but for 1 nights stay I don’t think it mattered much. The only downside was there was no front desk concierge or a place to store our luggage after check out in the morning.

I was pretty hungry so we walked to KePalle, an Arancini spot and shared the Eggplant Ragu Arancini and the Vegan Mushroom & Spinach Arancini. For a street food snack the Arancini was bigger than I expected and pretty filling! We started walking around Palermo to get our bearings but the city is like a maze. Some streets are more touristy than others with restaurants lined up against one another while others alleys are residential or barren and full of graffiti. The graffiti in Valencia was intentional and tasteful, but the graffiti in Palermo reminded me of Gotham City from Batman. 

By 6pm I was starting to crash and needed a pick me up so we stopped for coffee and it took us 10 minutes to explain that we wanted iced coffee. The lady asked us if we wanted coffee with milk, or milk with coffee which I found hysterical. We ended up getting a cold beverage that tasted like a coffee almond milkshake – works for me! 

Tonight’s dinner wasn’t until 9pm so we decided to live the Sicialian way and walk to a pizza spot called Mastunicola for an apertivo. Stelios asked the waiter what the local Sicilian pizza was and we ordered 1 to share. The dough was heavenly but I didn’t care for the pizza toppings much – fried onions, ricotta, and an onion jam. I wished we ordered one with tomato sauce but we were trying to lean into the local culture. Oh well, you live and you learn! It started to rain while at the pizzeria so we waited it out a bit, then walked back to our hotel to get the umbrella. On our way there we saw some crazy lightning but the city was so loud we couldn’t even hear the thunder. 

Luckily it stopped raining for the walk to dinner. Tonight we were dining at Trattoria Al cancellato which I found via TheFork app (Europe’s version of OpenTable). It was in an alley tucked away from the tourist traffic and not in a location you would randomly stumble upon – an excellent sign that this was going to be an incredible homemade meal. Walking into the restaurant felt like stepping into my Nanas small kitchen with the oven running – you could feel the heat from the oven and the smell of delicious Italian tomato sauce cooking. For a moment I was borderline sweating but thankfully they opened the windows a few minutes after we were seated. The trattoria was family run with the mom and dad working the front of their house, their daughter and other workers (cousins perhaps?) were working in the kitchen, and Nonna was seated at a table next to us with a glass of wine – proudly smiling as she watched her kids work and watched all of the people enjoy their meal. She was probably in her 90s and only spoke Italian it seemed, but I raised my glass of wine and smiled at her and she returned my gesture with a wide smile like we had some sort of understanding.

Every table in the restaurant was full, half seemed to be tourists and the other half were speaking Italian and seemed to be locals, and the menu was only in Italian – another good sign! For dinner we ordered 2 different pasta dishes – the pasta all Norma, and pasta Fresca with mushroom & pancetta. Both were homemade and delicious but the latter was our favorite. I wish I knew what type of noodles these were. We finished our meal by sharing 2 traditional Sicilian desserts – Semifreddo (a frozen Sicilian dessert) and Cassata (ricotta sponge cake). While our entire dinner was delicious, the food came out fairly quickly and we were done within an hour. The fastest European dinner we’ve ever encountered! I would’ve loved to stay and chat with the owners but the mom and dad were hustling around the restaurant and didn’t speak much English. 

When we got outside it was POURING! Thank goodness we stopped at the hotel for our umbrella. We walked 10 minutes back in the pouring rain to our hotel, and had no desire to venture back out. I guess we’ll never know what the Palermo nightlife would have been like.

A couple of notes on the culture in Palermo:

• Crossing the streets in Palermo is like playing game of frogger in real life. The cars don’t stop when the cross walk is green, and stop signs are completely ignored. We are crossing the streets praying we don’t get hit by a car, but the locals seem unbothered and just walk in the middle of traffic. 
• There seems to be no table service at most cafes in Palermo, you mostly order at the counter for “take away” and grab a table versus Spain all of the cafes we went to had waitress service
• The Napkins here are like recycled wax paper, so weird and not really useful 
• On certain streets where the restaurants are all next to each other, the restaurant workers haggle you to try and get you to sit down for a drink or apertivo which I find very annoying. If your restaurant is so good you shouldn’t need to convince me to dine there. Needless to say we avoided eating at those places. 

Before coming here I read that people either love Palermo or they don’t – unfortunately I have to go with the latter. Aside from dinner I was ready to move on. Dear Palermo, your arancini and pasta was very good, but 1 night was enough for me. Buona notte!