Day 18: Palermo

Palermo Festival
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We arrived via the ferry in Palermo, and cleared Italian customs with no issues at all. Only one passport check which was nice!

After spending about 30 minutes wandering around, we finally got our bearings and found Avis where we picked up our car. We then decided to drive around and find either parking or a hotel. It was extremely hot, and we would have liked to leave the car in the Avis garage with our suitcases in the trunk, but unfortunately we were not allowed.

there were literally hundreds and hundreds of skeletons all dressed in their clothes

Cooling off in Palermo
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With no real map negotiating Palermo was difficult, we finally found parking and had a drink at a café. The heat was killing us, but we pressed on towards the main city area (I had my laptop so we had a map we checked while we sat down for a coke, but it’s not very practical for walking around with).

We came across a hotel (Hotel Europa) and checked in. No problems here, although at 170 Euro it was definitely not cheap. There were few rooms available (hotels we tried beforehand were full) as there is a parade and festival this evening.

Europa Hotel in Palermo
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After this and a picnic lunch we got our car and drove to the Cappucini Catacombs. We got lost once on the way, which wasn’t too bad, although it is harrowing driving, not so much because of the other drivers (you just need to drive aggressively otherwise you will spend forever at an intersection with 50 cars behind you tooting) but the roads and signage. The roads are all narrow and not straight, they are also generally one way. Because they are all angled, if you go past where you want to be, turning around is very, very difficult.

Palermo Street
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The Catacombs were amazing. Although due to television we are all pretty well desensitized to skeletons, it was quite a unique experience to walk through catacombs where there were literally hundreds and hundreds of skeletons all dressed in their clothes, some posed, many different facial expressions and all ages. Most of the skeletons were people who died in the mid-late 1800s, the earliest I think was from the 1500s and may have been a religious person.

We spent about half an hour looking through the catacombs and Billy was great, not scared in any way and enjoyed talking about them. We then went back out into the heat (by this stage I had a thundering headache as I think did half the population), we got completely lost on the way back and it took us at least 45 minutes to return to our hotel (I’m sure it would have taken a taxi about 10 minutes).

Lunch
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Whew, a coffee and a nap for Billy is just the thing, in the cool air conditioning of the hotel. We have spent some time redoing our itinerary over the next few days taking into account the traffic situation (busy or traffic jam wouldn’t quite describe it, try throwing 50 matchsticks onto a plate and that’s called an intersection). One other thing we found was that the major roads on the map (we got one from the Hotel) were actually no bigger than the smaller ones in reality – think about the size of Little Collins St for a two way street and half that for a one way with cars parked on one side of the road and 10 million scooters flying around you.

Politeama
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We dragged ourselves out to a street festival which we were told not to miss. We were told a parade began at 8:30 to 11pm and then there were fireworks. In actual fact, the parade didn’t really exist…at about 10:30pm a float containing a Sicilian Saint (Roselea) was pushed past. Thousands of people turned out and the crush was exhausting as everyone tried to follow the float (we by this stage were just trying to get out of there but we couldn’t move three inches to get to a side street).

There were lots of celebrating, and I’m sure it went well into the evening and would have been a lot of fun with lots of alcohol consumed after the fireworks. However, as our day had been tiring, we made our way back to the hotel and were in bed shortly after midnight. Billy was disappointed, as we had been told there was a parade, and although as adults it was good to experience it, it was too tiring and not very interesting for children.

Tool of the Day

The guy who designed Palermo’s roads, they are the worst example of a city traffic system I have ever ever ever seen (and ever hope to see, particularly on this trip).