Viaggio in Sicilia / 14: 27 giugno – giovedì

Our late afternoon flight from Palermo to Naples left us plenty of time to top off the Palermo leg of this trip and round out our familiarity with Sicily’s capital city.  Having already walked around the Vucciria market, our stroll through Capò and Ballarò gave us a much broader sense of Palermo’s diverse if not dying market scene and of the distinctness and diversity of its four quarters (Castellammare, Kalsa, Capo and Ballarò).  And then there were the churches that continued to seduce us, the artistic and historical threads that remained to be tied.  We ran into Cristina (from Pistoia) in the Ballarò market and, with her assurance that San Giovanni degli Eremiti was close by, we revised our itinerary to make a detour. I was thrilled since San Giovanni had deeply impressed me in 1969, during my trip to Palermo and in my Padova art history course.  The smooth and sensuous, deep red domes, reminiscent of Sicily’s “oriental” air, the peaceful and handsomely landscaped small Gothic cloister, an oasis of tranquility and an otherwise boisterous and gritty metropolis, and the serene and starkly evocative interior: this all proved to be extremely rewarding.

Decorated ancient Greek vases such as the one featured above show that the scenes in market’s such as Palermo’s Ballarò neighborhood haven’t changed substantially over the centuries.

After San Giovanni we got back on track to head toward San Clotaldo, La Martorana’s neighbor which had been closed the day before.  With this equally –perhaps even greater– gem of Palermo’s distinctive Byzantine-Norman-Arabasque style we tied all the threads together of high and low Palermitana culture, or so we thought… And just when a very travel beleaguered Augusta expressed her delight that the coast was clear of Cristinas redirecting our traffic to yet another church, who should appear but our Pistoian acquaintance to report on the not-to-be-missed Chiesa del Gesù just up the block!  Augusta indulged and we topped our Sicily trip with a feast of formidably glazed, flamboyant cassata-style marble interior of Palermo’s Jesuit sanctuary.  Dizzying, to be true, but stunning, nonetheless.

With our heads still spinning from it all we took the bus to the airport, caught our much-delayed flight back to Naples and were back on the vicolo before we knew it… where Sicily, once again, began to recede into the dreamy realm of memory and imagination that it had inhabited for me so many years.

Photo album available on Flickr at: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjBBMTH