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| The day is again sunny and bright. Breakfast at the Hotel Principe di Villafranca is served in a elegant room off the sumptuous library. The food is fine, but the cappuccino is so bad that I am going to order tea tomorrow. After breakfast, we meet Signore Castellana who seems as happy to meet me in person as I am to meet him.
Our plan is to drive to the laundromat.....my only fear is that parking will not be as easy as it had been in Trapani. The drive itself was fine....traffic in Palermo is indeed heavy but there doesn't seem to be the sense of frenzy that I had felt in Trapani....the drivers all try to take advantage of hesitations and open space, but at the same time, there is a feeling that everyone can take their turn at intersections and merge points. In any case, my fears about parking are realized....we have little problem reaching the laundromat and we see that it is open, but no parking spaces are available on the street. The first public lot that they we see has a block long line of cars waiting to get in. On our fourth pass--on a new street--we are waved into another lot and leave the car--no ticket, no receipt, no nothing. We walk the two blocks back to the laundromat and the first person we see is an American woman who is doing her laundry. She assures us that the "signora" will be right back. The "signora" turns out to be an Italian woman of about 40 who speaks excellent American English and carries herself like an American. It turns out that she had lived in Boston for ten years and had recently opened up the laundromat, which she says is the only one in Palermo. She is very helpful--making change, getting us started, etc.--and we spend most of the time in the laundromat talking to her and the other American customers about Palermo, living in America, traveling in Italy, etc. She even tells us the story of her name--Lia, which is short for Rosalia who is the patron saint of Palermo and she urges to visit the shrine on top of Mount Pellegrino which overlooks the city. When I ask her about good restaurants, she recommends a place that her brother works at and even calls him to tell him to expect two Americans the next night. A wonderful experience and also clean clothes....a very successful outing. Even better, our car is still in the garage when we get back and the parking only costs Euro 2. We then head out to the beach suburb of Mondello.....we make our way fairly effortlessly through the traffic. The most challenging part of driving in Palermo is the need to be constantly vigilant about the Vespas and motorcycles that weave in and out of traffic--in all lanes and at any time. Mondello is about fifteen minutes from Palermo, but it is a different world. It has a broad sandy beach that curves around a pretty bay. There are hotels, beach clubs, vacation houses, and lots of restaurants. The main piazza is a broad plaza, open to the sea at the broad end, completely encircled by restaurants and bars and filled with people at 1 pm on a Wednesday afternoon. We make our usual circuit around the town before parking and walking back to the center. We pass one of the restaurants on my list--Trattoria Sympaty--and, even though they won't give us the last remaining outside table (it is reserved), we decide to eat there. We have a very good lunch.....and we have a view of the harbor from our inside table. I have mussels to start, which are excellent, and spaghetti alle vongole which is good also. Diana has prosciutto and melon, followed by spaghetti with sardines (a traditional Sicilian dish) and a grilled fish, which is wonderfully cooked and wonderfully fresh. We even decide to have a half bottle of a local white, even though wine with lunch often slows us down for the rest of the day. After an after lunch stroll and a short rest in the piazza--enjoying the sunshine and pleasant weather--we drive back to Palermo through one of the big parks, the Villa Favorita--Palermo appears to have a lot of green space--and then maneuver our way back to the hotel. After a while, we get in the car again and drive around the city to get our bearings. We drive through neighborhoods that we had not been in on our last trip and it becomes apparent that Palermo is a very big and diverse city. We also drive through the old historic district, which is indeed traffic clogged and dingy, but it doesn't have the same effect on Diana that it did on our last trip. We decide to eat close to the hotel again tonight, so that we can walk to dinner. The first of the two possibilities is called Sotto Sopra and we almost walk past it because it looks nothing like a traditional Italian restaurant. The place is sleek and modern, old black and white photographs of women from the movies on the wall; the tables and chairs are very modern as our the table setttings. The wait staff is dressed all in black. There are three tables occupied when we walk in. Right away, our waiter runs through the list of antipasti and is impatient when I ask for an explanation of one of the dishes. His response (in Italian) is "Don't you speak Italian?" We make choices....a prosciutto and cheese salad for Diana and some kind of tuna preparation for me. He then races through the primi choices.....Diana chooses the fettucine with asparagus and prosciutto and I decide to have the risotto with shrimp. We then wait to see what comes next. In fact, the food is great.....very nouvelle and non-traditional treatments of the dishes. Diana's prosciutto and cheese salad is cut into strips, served with arugula and dressed with balsamic vinegar. My tuna looks like a mound of tuna tartare and tastes to me like the Thai salad called laab. In any case, it was terrifically tasty. The primi are also excellent....asparagus slightly overcooked but tasty and the risotto extremely well prepared. Even the bread was unusual....rolls with olives....but good. The service is another story...the food comes very quickly but we are basically ignored after that. The restaurant staff is busy talking among themselves at one end of the bar. We are not even offered second courses and we turn down the offered desserts. It was a very strange experience, but in the end the food was very good. We stroll along the fashionable Via della Liberta (Palermo's equivalent of Michigan Avenue in Chicago) window shopping on our way back to the hotel. Tomorrow we plan to walk around the centro storico...... |
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