We’ve mentioned the Florio family twice now without quite stopping to tell their story: the golden age behind the wine and tuna trades in our post on the British in Palermo, and the boom already turning to bust as we opened our last post on the twentieth century. It’s time to go back and meet…
The Florios’ own golden age, the opera houses and new money of Palermo’s turn-of-the-century boom, is a story for its own post. For now, we pick up as that boom was already turning to bust, and follow Palermo through its hardest century: emigration, the heaviest bombing of any Italian city after Naples, and a mafia…
We ended our last post on a city turned inward: its Muslim population expelled under Frederick II, its Jewish population expelled under Spain, and its energies turned from trade towards the Church for the best part of two centuries. It took the arrival of Napoleon to shake Palermo out of that long quiet, and to…
Frederick II died in 1250, and with him died Sicily’s last homegrown dynasty. His son Conradin held the throne only briefly before the Pope handed Sicily to Charles of Anjou, the first in a long line of foreign rulers: the French, the Aragonese, the Spanish, the Austrians, the Bourbons and eventually, as part of a…
It’s a question we’re often asked on the ground in Palermo: are there any Arabs left in the city today? And if not, what became of them? The answer, as it turns out, takes a detour through a water clock, a coin, and one of the most extraordinary rulers of the medieval world. Three languages,…
Ask most people to name the great cities of twelfth-century Europe, and Palermo rarely comes up. Paris, Rome, Milan, perhaps Naples. And yet in the year 1100, only a handful of European cities were larger: Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Seville, Cordoba. The history of Palermo is a fascinating one… This is the first in a series of…
A disclaimer before we start. As a tour operator, I sit on both sides of this question at once, and I can’t pretend otherwise. We employ our own guides, and we work closely with drivers, and both very much appreciate a tip at the end of their work. At the same time, we look after…
Part One: The Varieties of Italy In Italy, few winter vegetables command as much respect, or as much passion, as the carciofo. Known in Sicilian dialect as cacòcciula, a term that appears in documents as early as 1416, the artichoke is not merely an ingredient here; it is a way of life. It can be…
Are you thinking about a walking holiday in Sicily? Maybe you’ve walked before in other parts of Italy and fancy something different this time, somewhere that isn’t Tuscany or Piemonte again. Sicily is a genuinely rewarding place to walk, and after twenty-five years exploring the island on foot, I want to give you an honest…
A few years ago, a lovely couple called Michael and Marion travelled with us. They lived in Southend, and they only ever went anywhere they could reach by budget airline from Southend Airport, always with hand luggage only. I remember once remarking on how light Michael’s bag looked, and he laughed. “Of course it’s light,”…
