palermo

I liked Palermo, but it certainly didn't feel easy. It wasn't (contrary to rumor and past fact) dangerous; it just wasn't friendly. I got crappy service (how was I supposed to know that, while on the mainland, a ball of fried risotto is an 'arancino,' in Sicily it's an 'arancina'?), but decent food. Frankly, I'm still not sure how I feel about Palermo. But I really liked some of the simpler mosaics, as below; and there were happier syntheses of Arab and Norman and Byzantine styles in its architecture, as in the Cathedral below. Still a bit weird, but it came together, especially from straight-on, with the whole building in view. Unfortunately, to take that picture would have put me smack in the middle of a wide street, which is not where you want to be in Palermo.



Socrates? They certainly got the ugly right.



And a more conventional bust of Aristotle... both from the Archaeological Museum in Palermo, which was great, in part because it's so eccentric. It houses, interspersed among some actually very valuable things, the world's largest collection of ancient anchors.