Four years ago, Palermo was one of those cities that stayed with us.
We had stayed not far from where we stayed this time, wandered many of the same streets and immediately loved the collision of cultures that seemed to exist everywhere. Arab influences beside Norman architecture. Baroque façades around the corner from buildings that looked untouched for generations. Markets, churches, courtyards and people all layered on top of one another.
We liked Palermo enough that coming back was an easy decision.
What we didn’t expect was how different it would feel.
The first time, we noticed the graffiti. We noticed the garbage. We noticed the rough edges and the places that seemed a little neglected.
This time, I barely saw any of it.
I don’t think Palermo necessarily changed that much in four years.
I think we did.
Somewhere during six and a half weeks of travelling through Europe, we stopped evaluating cities. We stopped looking at maps quite so much. We stopped worrying about whether we had seen the right monuments or walked down the right streets.
By Palermo, we had simply started living.
A City That Has Never Really Started Over
Understanding Palermo’s history helped explain why the city feels the way it does.
Its story stretches from its Phoenician beginnings through Roman and Byzantine rule, the Arab period, the Normans and the many rulers who followed. But what interested us wasn’t memorizing who came next.
It was seeing what they did with what was already there.
Palermo rarely seems to have wiped the slate clean.
One generation inherited something and decided what to do with it.
Keep it.
Change it.
Build onto it.
Give it another purpose.
The Cathedral may be the best example. Its site had already lived several lives before the structure we see today took shape, and centuries of alterations continued afterward. Standing outside, you can almost read those layers in the building itself. Towers, arches, domes and details don’t seem to belong to one single architectural moment because they don’t.
That became much more interesting to us than trying to decide whether something was Arab, Norman, Gothic or Baroque.
It was all Palermo.
Even destruction became another layer.
During the Second World War, Palermo was heavily bombed. As rubble was cleared from the damaged city, some of it was pushed toward the sea and used as fill along the waterfront.
There was something strangely fitting about that.
Even the remains of what had been destroyed became part of what came next.
Palermo doesn’t seem to start over.
It continues.
The Stories Behind the Buildings
We still saw the monuments this time.
We just stopped treating them like items on a list.
Piazza Pretoria became more than a place to photograph an elaborate fountain. Learning why the Fontana Pretoria became known as the Fountain of Shame was far more interesting than simply admiring it. Over the centuries, different stories became attached to the name — the naked figures, the enormous expense, political resentment — until the stories themselves became part of the monument.
That seemed very Palermo too.
A building or fountain might have an official history, but the people eventually create another one around it.
Teatro Massimo was another example.
It is impossible to ignore physically, but what interested us more this time was how much it seemed to shape the area around it. The streets, cafés, bars and pedestrian spaces nearby all seemed to orbit around this enormous cultural landmark.
The building was impressive.
The life around it was more interesting.
People gathered there.
And the more time we spent in Palermo, the more we realized that people have always gathered here.
A City That Gathers
The more history we learned, the more Palermo started to feel like a city built around people finding ways to organize themselves.
Sometimes that meant trade.
Sometimes religion.
Sometimes family.
Sometimes protection.
Sometimes survival.
Even learning about the Mafia changed some of the assumptions I had arrived with.
When I heard “Sicilian Mafia,” part of me immediately thought, oh great, The Godfather.
But the story was far less cinematic.
Its roots were connected to periods when formal authority and protection were weak and private networks stepped in to provide protection, mediation and influence. Eventually those systems became something much darker — coercion, extortion and organized criminal power.
What interested me was how something could begin by filling a vacuum and then transform into something capable of controlling the very people it claimed to protect.
It was another piece of Palermo’s much larger story of communities organizing themselves when the systems around them weren’t enough.
Thankfully, we saw much happier versions of that instinct everywhere.
It seemed as though there were fireworks almost every night.
A church somewhere would be celebrating a festival, and another neighbourhood would have people pouring into the streets. What struck me wasn’t the religion of it.
It was the community.
These churches seemed to function as neighbourhood anchors. A festival wasn’t simply about faith; it was also about belonging. This was their church, their street, their neighbourhood and their celebration.
People had somewhere they belonged.
The Market Question
Palermo’s markets are another part of the city’s identity.
They helped shape how Palermo eats, and initially they were exactly what we expected them to be: busy, noisy and overflowing with food.
Vendors calling out.
Produce spilling toward the street.
Fish, vegetables, meats and prepared foods everywhere.
There was an energy to it.
But there was also something that made us pause.
The market street felt as though it was right on the edge of becoming a show for tourists.
We went back on Monday morning and saw a very different version.
Food that hadn’t sold the previous day was being put back out. The vendors seemed tired. There was less engagement, less theatre and less energy.
Seeing both versions made me reconsider what the market actually stood for.
Was it still primarily there for the people who lived around it?
Or had it started performing an idea of a Sicilian market for the people passing through?
I’m still not sure.
Maybe it was both.
And perhaps that is just another example of Palermo doing what it has always done — adapting an old space to a new reality without completely giving up what came before.
Recipes Behind the Convent Walls
One of my favourite food stops also managed to bring Palermo’s food and history together.
We went to I Segreti del Chiostro at the former convent of Santa Caterina, where traditional Sicilian sweets associated with Palermo’s convent kitchens are still made.
For generations, convents weren’t only religious spaces. They became part of the communities around them, and some developed elaborate pastry traditions of their own.
There was something wonderful about walking into a place connected to that history and having a cannolo.
By this point in Sicily we had eaten plenty of elaborate food, but moments like this kept bringing us back to something much simpler.
A pastry.
Ricotta.
A recipe that has survived because people kept making it.
Once again, Palermo seemed to be taking something from its past and simply carrying it forward.
Leaving the Tourist Areas to the Tourists
We had already seen the version of Palermo that most visitors come to see.
So this time, we increasingly left the tourist areas to the tourists.
We wandered farther out.
We stopped looking at maps.
We followed streets because there were people on them rather than because Google told us there was something to see.
And somehow, we always found our place.
Food.
A drink.
A crowded sidewalk.
A courtyard.
Community.
We found some fantastic restaurants outside the old centre where every table around us was speaking Italian.
That became one of our new measures of whether we had found somewhere good.
If nobody was speaking English and the server treated us exactly like everyone else, we were probably staying.
One lunch in particular felt less like going to a restaurant and more like sitting down at someone’s nonna’s house.
There wasn’t really an elaborate ordering process.
We were told what they had.
Yes or no.
I had spaghetti with sausage and aubergine.
Curtis had spaghetti al pomodoro.
Simple food.
And it was fantastic.
Palermo consistently gave us some of the best food we ate in Sicily. Agrigento had treated us well too, but Palermo seemed to deliver meal after meal. It wasn’t necessarily because everything was elaborate or surprising.
Quite the opposite.
A lot of the best food tasted like someone knew exactly what they were making and saw absolutely no reason to complicate it.
When Palermo Comes Out
Four years ago, we caught a glimpse of Palermo’s youthful nightlife.
This time, we experienced much more of it.
Interestingly, not always in the same places.
Some of the old gathering spots seemed increasingly shared with tourists. It almost felt as though the locals had decided they had shared enough and simply found new streets.
So we found those streets too.
What we discovered felt energetic and full of potential.
Quiet areas changed after dark.
Sidewalks became gathering spaces.
Courtyards that barely registered during the afternoon filled with tables and groups of friends.
Wine.
Beer.
Cocktails.
Conversation.
Not just on weekends.
Every night.
There was very little English around us.
Sometimes ordering a drink meant yelling the order in Italian just to be heard over the crowd.
And I loved it.
It didn’t feel like we were being shown Palermo.
Palermo was simply happening around us and, for a little while, we were part of it.
Groups grew larger as friends arrived. Drinks appeared. The day slipped into evening, and whatever worries people had carried with them seemed to disappear sip by sip.
Nobody was doing anything extraordinary.
They were simply together.
Maybe that is what made it feel extraordinary.
Somewhere Along the Way, We Stopped Being Tourists
By that point in the trip, something had changed.
We would leave where we were staying without really knowing where we were going.
We weren’t chasing landmarks anymore.
Yes, we still saw them.
Yes, we still wanted to understand them.
But they were no longer the reason we were outside.
Instead of thinking, hey, we’re tourists seeing Palermo, it started feeling more like, hey, we’re Italians wandering around and discovering something today.
Obviously we weren’t Italians.
But for the first time on the trip, I understood what it might mean to live somewhere instead of visit it.
We stopped observing the rhythm and started moving with it.
Eat when it feels right.
Stop somewhere because it is busy.
Order what they have.
Stay for another drink.
Walk home later.
Do it again tomorrow.
Four years earlier, Palermo’s rough edges had demanded our attention.
This time, they almost disappeared.
The people came forward instead.
Leaving Palermo
When we finally left, I felt something I hadn’t expected.
A void.
It felt like I had left a piece of myself in Palermo and taken a piece of Palermo with me.
I don’t quite know what that means yet.
Maybe Palermo deepened my appreciation for simple food — food that doesn’t need an explanation or decoration to be memorable.
Maybe it made me appreciate community differently.
Maybe watching people gather every evening reminded me how important it is simply to have somewhere you belong.
Or maybe the lesson was smaller than all of that.
Maybe it was learning to stop looking so hard for what I was supposed to see.
Palermo changed something in me.
I’m just not entirely sure what it was yet.
And somehow, that feels like a better souvenir than anything I could have brought home.
Justyn Perry
Justyn shares first-hand travel stories, honest recommendations and the practical details that make a journey easier to plan.
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