We were supposed to meet our friend, Tai, in Palermo today with Kosmos. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate with our plans. It was windy and choppy on the seas. So, we rented a car, instead. We drove up to Cinisi to pick Tai up from his hotel. Cinisi is a small town near the Palermo airport, about 31 kilometers west of from the city of Palermo.

Outside the town of Trapani, the landscape is exactly what you imagine Italy to be. Gently rolling hills with acre upon acre of farmland, empty windy roads, and a farmhouse dotting the landscape here and there. It looks like a sports car ad. It is beautiful. Here there are more vineyards and less fruit orchards. There also seems to be a bigger variety of produce grown than on the other side of the island.

Cinisi is a seaside community, and even has its own little marina. The town is adorable and quaint. We found Tai and headed on to Palermo. We had no real plan for sightseeing, and we weren’t really sure where to go. We followed signs that said “city center”. When we got to where the buildings looked really old, we parked. We had no clue whatsoever where we were. We immediately saw that we had stumbled across one of the three open air markets in the city’s old center. This market was basically vendors selling assorted items from folding tables a long a series of narrow streets. There was a lot of produce, cheese, fish and meats, which made for an interesting combination of smells that Tai commented “is not always pleasant”. There were also a lot of low end miscellaneous items you’d find at a 99 cents store. It was hard to get a good look at the buildings behind the vendors, but they looked pretty run down from what we could tell. We made our way through the market and continued on, finding the train station. Ah ha! A land marker! We now knew where we were, but, unfortunately, not where we had left the car.

We decided to head to the center of the historic district, Quattro Canti (four corners). We followed a main road northwest. What is interesting is the main roads have a similar atmospheric feel to Valletta, but the side streets the market was on felt more like Ortygia. The main roads are wide and straight and the buildings are stately. As we strolled along, Christi commented that she felt like we were in a 50’s movie set in Europe. The fact that there were so many old cars and scooters on the road, and so many modern retro looking cars just added to the nostalgic ambiance of the streets.

We found the Quattro Canti, an intersection with matching ornate buildings on each corner. It seems as if most of the buildings around here were built in the 1400’s.

In the couple blocks around this intersection, there were a bunch of churches. One was the Sicilian Baroque style similar to the façade of the Il Duormo church in Siracusa (the one that was a converted Greek temple). There were three that look similar to the churches we saw in Malta. There is one that looks like it is an amalgamation of Byzantine, Romanesque, and baroque. Christi suspects it may be a converted mosque with a facelift.

If you lived in a neighborhood with at least 5 Roman Catholic churches all within one block of you, how would you decide which church to attend? How do city planners justify so many of the same kind of church in such a short radius. Were there really enough people in the neighborhood to support so many? OK, enough of the tangent. Back to the sights.

In between two of the churches is the Piazza Pretoria, which is dominated by a huge fountain called Fontana Pretoria. The fountain is an elaborate piece of sculpture, with several terraces and a staircase leading up to the center of the top terrace. It is graced by dozens of very beautiful nude full size statues. It was erected in 1573. At the time, the people attending the churches dubbed the sculpture “the fountain of shame” because of the nudity. They have closed off the fountain so you can’t walk up into it anymore. The building behind it is a civic building of some sort.

The church on one side of the piazza had a wedding going on, so we didn’t go in there. We did go into the church on the other side of the piazza. It has a layout similar to the churches in Malta, with both sides of the church lined with little chapels and domes gracing the roof. It is a baroque style decor, and predictably, had every square inch covered in exquisite décor, be it colored marble designs, ornately adorned statues or paintings. Each and every individual piece of art was beautiful and fabulous, but the combined effect was that it was just too much to take in, making you feel dizzy and overwhelmed. Of course, the ceiling was exquisitely painted, but what was odd is that this particular church has actual sculptures of people attached to the ceiling instead of just paintings of people like most of the other baroque churches we have been to. It kind of looks like dead bodies strung up there. It was eerie.

We stopped by yet another church with a similar layout, but with little décor. There were a few wall paintings and a ceiling painting, but the majority of the church was blank white walls. That was a surprise.

After leaving the church, we walked a few blocks and found ourselves in another open air market. This one was set up in a series of even narrower streets, selling mostly middle of the road non-perishable products, including a lot of underwear.

We came to the back side of what we thought was the palace. It turned out to be the cathedral, built in the Arab-Norman style unique to Sicily. It is absolutely gorgeous from the outside, definitely the most unique church we have seen yet. The building complex is enormous, like too big to get the whole front of the building into a single photograph. The first shot is part of the front, the second shot is part of one of the sides.

The interior has a similar layout to the other churches of the same era, but the décor is much more tasteful. There are still lots of stunning pieces of art, but they are interspersed around the building with lots of plain space between them. The trim around the building, such as crown moldings, are painted the same grayish color as most of the walls, rather than gold or some other bright color. The effect is that you can appreciate the art without being overwhelmed. There is an attached crypt and treasury that we decided to skip.

We decided we had done enough walking around and tried to find the car. We ventured through a pretty park, then down a series of narrow, Norman looking streets. In this section of town the buildings look to be better maintained than the part of town the car is parked in.

Eventually did find the car. Yay! Getting out of Palermo wasn’t so easy. We were stuck in a lot of traffic before we finally found our way back to the highway. We headed back to Trapani and had dinner before retiring for the night.