Socially, Palermo is divided into classes, the lower and the middle. The aristocracy, which has a presence and a political voice in Venice or Rome, has no influence in Sicily, and neither does the great business wealth that has all but displaced nobility throughout Europe.
For me a walk through Palermo, with or without the baby in his pram, would be incomplete without greeting Tony. I knew his late father, who died of cancer some years ago, but then who didn’t?
Italian is a language not averse to populism, apparently, because the word palazzo means both a nobleman’s palace, such as the one where Cinderella crashed the party, and an apartment building inhabited by lowly plebes, such as the one where I live.
As I walk the streets with the baby in his pram, I scrutinize the faces of passing women and note how few distinct types there are in Palermo. The streets here are a kind of itinerant art museum, where in a single day one sees quite a few Parmigianinos, Pollaiuolos, and Ghirlanaios. How else? Their ancestors, bakers’ daughters or admirals’ wives, probably sat for all those portraits.
Last week, as young Vasily and I walked the Via Maqueda, the gentle reader may recall the sharp turn we made on reaching the railway station. This brought us to the Chinese quarter, and to urban blight of a different kind.
Via Maqueda is a Spanish name, which the street takes from a viceroy of Sicily who was called – rather fetchingly, if you ask me – Bernardino de Cárdenas y Portugal, Duke of Maqueda. So originally the “que” was pronounced as “k,” but the Sicilians pronounce it the way an English speaker would read it.
The experience I’m about to relate is little different from Tom Sawyer’s in the famous episode of painting the fence. The point Mark Twain makes – that something is only fun when it isn’t a job – is far from incidental to the great American writer’s thinking, but instead runs through all his works, from his stories to his sketches and travelogues.
I know I test the gentle reader’s credulity when I say that I was among the first in the world to own a mobile phone, but it’s true. It was a Motorola flip job in matte black, and I received it as a gift from my father-in-law of the day, who in turn had received two samples of that novel contraption as a gift from the manufacturer.
I share the gentle reader’s annoyance at the newfangled spelling of place names, and on coming across “Kyiv” or “Turkiye” it always seems to me that, like Rip Van Winkle, I had fallen asleep for many years and woke up in another world, bizarre, irrational, and just plain irksome.
I heard that before the war and the concomitant impoverishment of the Russian oligarch, wideboys from Moscow and points east used to rent whole villages in Sicily for parties, which they had learned from their betters to call corporate entertainment.
