Posted by dylan on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 in 2017 Blog post.

Palermo was the first city we visited that actually felt like an urban center. The vast majority of the cities we’ve passed through seem to exist only for their attractions. Even Cefalù feels a little fake and overrun with tourists after a little bit of observation. Admittedly, in most cities we’ve visited, we only really saw the areas that held the ruins, but since Palermo is the capital of and largest city in Sicily, it had much more than just historical qualities to it, which is something I really appreciated about the city.

Palermo is authentically its own; it lives in the present in ways that other areas we’ve visited have not. In Palermo, I saw posters criticizing the G7 conference that is to be held in Taormina (posters which were absent from the tourist utopia of Taormina itself) alongside graffiti that gave the city a more lived-in and even lively feeling in my eyes. Anti-facist and pro-Communist graffiti was everywhere; on every alleyway there were hammers and sickles or spraypainted words reading “no room for the facists.” I even passed a column that had poems attached all around it.

The bustling streets, towering buildings, and diverse population do, however, hold a more sobering facet: the city’s landscape came at the cost of many open spaces and historic villas. After World War II, Palermo was struggling to recover from the bombing and from the swarms of refugees from surrounding communities. The nascent Mafia sprung at the opportunity to gain wealth and quickly took over the city’s construction projects, demolishing beautiful old houses and erecting apartment complexes that were dilapidated to begin with, labeled as “palaces.” Especially now as they begin to fall apart in earnest, the city has lost some of the beauty it used to have. To quote Vittoria, “When did we lose this sense of beauty? When did we abandon monuments in favor of these appalling apartments?”

Despite this, I still firmly believe that it has a beauty of its own. While many in our group thought the city dirty and decrepit, I found it alive and intriguing, authentic in its mess. Palermo will always hold a special place in my heart, despite of—and even because of—its long and tumultuous history. The very things that make it unappealing to some only serve to make it more unique; they reveal its history and tensions and make it more real, more true to itself, more beautiful.

While Keats wrote this poem on a more classical form of beauty, I think this excerpt is relevant here.

         When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn