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Published: April 25th 2010
April 6 was our day to see Palermo, which turned out to be mildly disappointing. The bus we took into town stopped at about 20 more stops than it had the night before, so it took us about an hour to get into town, and then the main museum we had been planning on seeing was closed for renovations. We then tried to go in some churches that we had written down from our guidebooks, but they were also closed (or we couldn’t find the doors—one of the two). We did go into a random church we just found on a road we were walking on, and it was pretty and old. We saw Cathedrale, the main cathedral in Palermo, and it was beautiful, as well as an old Palermo Palace with a church with the most beautiful mosaics I’ve ever seen. We tried to go into another museum next door, which was also closed, and then went to an abbey next door, which was pretty.
We also took a horse-drawn carriage ride around a piece of the town, which was fun. (Allison LOVES horses—the horse guy saw us looking at his horse across the street and if we wanted
a ride. I asked how much he said 40 euro. We said no. We started to walk away and he asked how much we would pay for it. We said 20 euro. He said, ok, for you two, 30 euro. We began walking away again, and eventually he cracked and took us on a ride for 20 euro. Pretty sweet deal.)
Also, Palermo is famous for its puppetry, which we had heard about from a few different places. I dragged Allison to a puppet theater close by that was having a performance at 5:30 so that we could see the craft first hand (haha). We sat for a while with a German couple (who was fluent in English and Italian, which was useful for communicating with the puppet guy). Sadly, he had to cancel the show because we were the only four people there. Luckily, I had written down the addresses of two other puppet theaters—we went to both of them, which weren’t exactly close, and saw that their shows had been canceled for the night too. Take note: do not go to Palermo when it’s not tourist season. Oh and we also saw a random store/place that looked
like a puppet theater and we tried to ask if there was a show we could watch because there were people there and it looked open, but the guy running it didn’t really speak English but eventually communicated to us that it was for babies or something…
We then began our long quest for food. We searched for restaurants—any restaurant that was open—for about an hour before getting fed up and taking our 628 bus back towards our hostel and finding a pizza place close to there—we were so hungry by the time we got there, anything would have been delicious. We both ordered a salad to start with and were each served a huge platter of plain shredded iceberg lettuce. Interesting.
We finished dinner, weren’t sure exactly where the closest bus stop was (since we’d walked a bit from where we had gotten off) but luckily there was a 628 coming down the road just as we were leaving the restaurant and we were able to run flailing our arms and it stopped for us.
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Mom
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Palermo is only for tourists
So you'll have to go back to Palermo during the tourist season to see the puppetry in full swing. Even though you didn't get to see everything on your list, you got to see the town and a few sights. Looks beautiful, with the palm trees and interesting geology there.