It’s fair to admit that my memories of my last call in Palermo are somewhat…fuzzy. Lost in the haze of good friends, good food and Italian house red; days like that get freeze framed, you remember the individual moments clearly – as though they were sculpted in stained glass – but the actual physical paths you took to get to those moments? Those you don’t remember. So when KitKat and I got off the ship this morning and she asked if she knew where I was going I was forced to admit that I had no particular goal in mind.
I had places I would have liked to find but was lost as to how to find them.
So ultimately we looked at each other, shrugged, discussed it briefly, and ended up in the back of a horse-drawn tour carriage, letting someone else do the finding for us.
Definitely a good choice.
We lucked out, and got an excellent guide, who not only was genuinely friendly, but trusted us enough to have us pay after the tour (because we had to stop at a bank machine to do so) and paused frequently so that he could take pictures for us, and slowed down every time KitKat had her camera raised (which is frequently, my twin is a bit of a shutterbug). As a result, I’m pretty sure the hour tour that we paid for ended up being nearer to an hour and a half, but …was worth it.
Palermo is a working city, it’s crowded, the traffic is crazy (and trying to cross the street can be taking your life in your hands even if the lights are supposedly in your favour) but if you take the time to actually look it’s a lovely little port. Well, not that little really. The tour took us past all three opera houses, past the fountain that was considered too scandalous even for Florence, and ultimately ended up dropping us just steps from the ship. Which put us just in time for lunch. One thing I did remember what that there is a really yummy pizza place right near one of the opera houses, I even remembered which opera house, but again with the how to get there.
It’s one of those places you can’t find until you fall on top of it
Those are the best ones!
I know! But I can’t remember how to fall on it!
And we wander around a corner
Ah ha! There it is!
So at long last I got my proper Italian pasta, which means I can now leave Italy a very happy girl.