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Everything is loud. and I seem to have spent most of my time following incomprehensible maps around incomprehensible streets, being hooted and beeped at - almost crushed out of the way. I’ts almost like being back in India. Almost...
Palermo is louder and shoutier than I remember but it’s also more elegant. Well, some places are. The ones that pay their protection money that is... The others are made up of crumbling buildings, half-open to the sky, showing what’s left of their previous lives - a sink attached to a wall, speckled and torn wallpaper, a skylight.... Whilst every paper proclaims the success of the war on cosa nostra, and the Falcone-Borsellino airport is named after two martyred anti-mafiosi, it seems the streets tell a different story. Where once there was organisation, now there is chaos. Clearing up the corruption has left a vaccum. Once up on a time you knew who to pay to get your building put up, your streets cleaned. Take away the centuries old rotten structure of bribery, extortion and corruption and you’re left with rotten structure on the streets. Whilst Sicily’s politicians are doing a great job at clearing up at the top, it seems
that they’ve neglected to put a structure in at the bottom that was previously offered by the anti-state. What the future will bring is anyone’s guess...
Whilst over the years I’ve changed from being addressed as ‘Signorina’ to ‘Signora’ ( I can’t work out if this is a good or bad thing) one thing that hasn’t changed is Italian TV. Still the gurning presenters with waist-length hair and Donatella-style pouts. Plunging, sequinned mini dresses, that should have been banned in the ‘80s, shimmer off the arms of white suits. And that’s just the newsreaders. Talent shows, of which there are nearly as many as we have, are a whole different song and dance. The cheeky girls are everywhere.
The beauty of Palermo is the mix of Baroque and Norman architecture, sometimes not only side by side but sometimes as part of the same building. La Martorana for instance, whose 12th century triple arches house both mosaics and rich carvings. Every winding street offers up countless places to pray, sometimes one just across from another. However my own form of praying
proved harder to find, though when we did settle down to some clamari, octopus (see below) or the more
typical Pasta con Sarde (pasta with sardines) we found ourselves paying London prices, which often left a bitter taste.
What was more price-worthy was the stay on the coast.
Atelier sul Mare is an ‘art hotel’ (www.ateliersulmare.it). That is to say, it’s a hotel and it’s art. It does neither brilliantly, though it is certainly interesting. The Atelier is in the village of Castel di Tusa about 90 km form Palermo. The nearest town is Cefalu, overshadowed by a giant rock at the top of which are the ruins of a 6th century so-called temple of Diana, 270 m above the beach. Apart from delicious gelaterie (tested and tasted) there is little else in the village of Castel di Tusa, whose windy cobbled streets lead down to a pebbled beach and more crazy rocks. What the village does have is a lot of swallows. The whitewashed walls of the hotel are home to several nests and the almost domesticated birds aren’t afraid of darting in and out of the rrom, seemingly undaunted by the most explicit of intimacies. The nests themselves must have inspired the creation of one room in particular ‘Il Nido’ by the artist Paolo Icaro.
The pure white room takes on the lines and hollows of a swallows nest perched on the very side of a building, whilst the circular and eveloped bed is fluffed with what appear to be white feathers.
The only entrance to the hotels is covered in clippings and articles about the hotel, whilst the decor of the rest of the building rejects this minimalism and bright shards of colour take over the ceramic floor the painted stones and the stained-glass windows. The room of the Prophet is dedicated to Pier Paolo Pasolini, by the owner-artist Antonio Presti, Dario Belleza and Adele Cubria. If this room doesn’t seduce you, then I don’t know what will. A brash lock, flush against an unfinished wall takes the kkey to a drawbridge, painted with Pasolini’s poetry which you read as it lowers itself from vertical to horizontal allowing you to then walk over it. Inside, the Yemenite walls lead you into narrow winding corridors and spit you out into a vast room whose only window-wall opens on the sea, allowing you to feel like you are hovering above, just like the swallows that circle. The ‘Torre di Sigismundo’ is all darkness refecting the
state of mind of the character Astolfo, from the Song of Roland. That is, until you open up the shutters at the top of the Tower. The romance of this room is undeniable as you open the giant shutters from the enormous circular bed to gaze up at the night sky. Or at least it would be if it hadn’t been a typically Sicilian/Fawlty Towers experience where the shutters got stuck and a sighing Sicilian had to climb onto the roof. A lot of swearing and clanging and crumbling iron and mud followed before the tower was locked up.
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steph lord
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.....and here was I looking forward to a week in Burnham on Sea!
Wow Susie.........love the photos and the thought of a round bed with shutters above. I want your holidays.......can swap a week in a caravan in Burnham on Sea (26th July) or a week in a caravan (12ft prestige!!!) in Weymouth (16th August). Deal or no deal?