Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, 13-15 October

As mentioned earlier, we slowed way down Sunday and have maintained that pace for a couple of days. I did find time Sunday afternoon to make a pot of vegetable soup using fresh vegetables we’d picked up at our veggie friend’s stand and a cube of chicken boullion from the Familia Supermercato. That zuppa fed us Sunday and Monday evenings.

Monday and Tuesday we combined bus rides with a goodly amount of walking as we began our search for clothing stores and for a parruchiera for me. Jim had his hair cut a couple of days back over in Borgo Vecchio by a barber he’d used in 2016 and my hair is beginning to need a little help. While out, getting off the main drags of Via Roma and Via Maqueda, we passed by the Palermo cathedral, the Palazzo dei Normanni, Palatine Chapel, Porta Nuova and a couple of parks. Unlike past visits to the cathedral, this time we saw the Float of Saint Rosalia beside the Archbishops’ Palace and the cathedral. Saint Rosalia, fondly known as la Santuzza or little saint, was a virgin and hermit who lived on Mount Pellegrino. She is the patron saint of Palermo plus a town in Mexico and three in Venezuela!

Rosalia died in 1166. When a plague hit Palermo in 1624, she reportedly appeared in a vision to a sick woman and then to a hunter. She is said to have given the hunter the location of her bones and told him to carry the bones around Palermo three times. When that task was completed, the plague lifted. She became venerated as the patron saint of Palermo. We visited the grotto where she lived, and died, and is now the Sanctuary of Santa Rosalia, back in 2016. The bones are there.

It’s hard to remember the mission when walking about these Italian towns, especially the old cities. We were out looking for clothing and shoe stores as well as hairdresser shops. Still, it’s hard not to ogle at the other attention getters, even the long, narrow alleys.

I think we are still in Monday and eventually headed back into Centro Storico and then down to Borgo Vecchio as we wanted bread and more veggies and fruit. The buildings, here palaces or palazzo, which can have office or store spaces all around on the ground floor and offices above. There are almost always apartments and other living spaces above. Most, if not all, have a central courtyard or quadrangle onto which doors, balconies and windows open. Plus, some will have car garages on the ground floor with doors and access from inside the central quadrangle. But look at the ornamentation on the roof, the freshness of the facades: we just marvel at how darn beautiful these buildings are and then think about who might have designed and built them, several hundred years ago! Certainly not Pulte or Kolter or Del Webb!

We headed out early on Tuesday as well. This turned out to be the big day for Jim as we rode the bus all the way out to the Renzo Barbera Soccer Stadium where the busses turn around and head back to our end near the train station. On the way back we stopped off in one the shopping areas and found a shop with several outfits we liked on Jim. Several hundred Euros later, we headed back home to drop off the bags of clothes and shoes!

We headed right back out as we had another mission for this beautiful day. Have we mentioned that the weather has been perfect all week long, until today. Sunshine, 65º at night; 75º in the afternoons. In 2016, we had eaten lunch with Chad and Juli alongside the Palermo marina which sits inside the Port of Palermo. That restaurant was the objective. We’ve been looking for frittata mista which doesn’t really sound like fried fish but is. Actually more like shellfish maybe – shrimp, prawns, octopus, and perhaps chuncks of white fish. They are dipped in a very light batter and dropped in light olive oil as the frying element.

By now, our legs were beginning to react to all the walking of the morning, even with that initial bus ride, so we headed home. Since we were passing by our favorite little gelato shop, we felt we just had to support the local business! It’s not good to have a gelato shop with in a block and a half of your apartment.

We were expecting rain on Wednesday but the morning skies were clear so we planned to take off on another mission, to ship some stuff back home. We started a load of wash before we left, hoping the washer would be finished by the time we returned. These washers take a good two hours to complete even the shortest cycle. Anyway, the Mail Boxes Etc store is 20 minutes away but we made the trek and had the box on the way by 10:00. We then headed towards the more attractive shopping areas in town, renewing our search effort for clothes, shoes, purses and a hairdresser.

We managed to find a pair of shoes and an outfit or two but decided to drop off the load at the apartment before resuming the hunt. One thing lead to another so we did lunch and hung out the clothes but thought we would wait awhile to see how the weather panned out. It didn’t. There were a few sprinkles so we brought the drying rack into the house and stayed home the rest of the day. We’d have been soaked had we been down town still looking for those shops. Well, we could have stayed dry in a bar I guess.

Oh, not sure you’ll recall this from a post during our 2022 trip over on the other end of Sicily – it was Catania or Siracusa. There were a fairly large number of shelters with food and water provided for the feral cats. It must be a Sicilian thing because we have our own cat hotel right next door to the apartment building!

That’s about it for the last three days. Hopefully the rain holds off tomorrow morning as it did today and we can resume the search.