A number of years have passed since my last visit to Palermo, and a few things have changed. The areas immediately surrounding the city’s newly-listed UNESCO World Heritage sites have been tidied up, made more photogenic. A minute’s walk away, meanwhile, residents still lament the irregularity of rubbish collections.
Unlike in many of the city centre’s other markets, you can still do your weekly grocery shop with relative ease in Ballarò, where I am staying. Guidebooks often describe Palermo’s historic markets as medieval time capsules — Winding streets! Live chickens in the centre of town! — but Ballarò is every part a modern, practical and evolving institution. Bengali bitter gourds and Nigerian yams are on sale alongside cucuzze, the light-green, snake-like squash found in much of the Italian south, and this should not be remarkable or surprising. The market is not a museum.
Ballarò market caters to a diverse clientele of residents new and old, but not only that. It now also sells a number of caricatured, Sicily-themed trinkets I had not spotted on my previous visits, including shot glasses bearing Marlon Brando’s face. Some of them have “il padrino sono io” written on them, “I am the Godfather,” for Italians who find themselves quaggiù, ‘down here,’ precisely because of the pervasive stereotypes about Sicily, not in spite of them. Others, aimed squarely at international tourists, simply read “The Godfather.”
Other things have remained much the same. When looking for sandals in the market, I could only find pairs with an unusually high platform, which I was reluctant to buy. Although I suffer from the common Welsh affliction of short, stocky legs, I have largely made my peace with this, and the thick sandals did not feel particularly comfortable at first. I soon became grateful for the platform, however, when walking to dinner over the precarious cobblestones of the fish market. I stepped on an uneven slab, which gave way to reveal a puddle of melting ice that had been keeping fish cool all day. A millimetre less and my toes would have been drenched. It is not clear that the sandal salesman had this particular threat in mind, but the invisible hand of the market works in mysterious ways. Sometimes you don’t end up with the sandals you want, but the sandals you need.
The presence of genuinely portable snack stalls may appear to be another constant that links past, present and future visits to Palermo. These are not food trucks, or ‘holes in the wall,’ but barbecues, vats of hot oil, or cauldrons of meat on wheels. The last time I had eaten a pane con panelle e crocchè — a croquette and chickpea fritter sandwich — this entirely yellow snack cost a euro. Remarkably, it still does. But although the food remains much the same, it now has a relatively new name. It is no longer il cibo di strada, food that just happens to be sold in the street. It has become lo Street Food, for which visitors to the city are now on the lookout. These little stalls used to bear little to no factual information, but they now invariably have something like “Sicilian Street Food” written on or near them. Whether in Phnom Penh or Palermo, this is a label that sells.
The frisson of smoking coals is universal, but a particular exoticism draws visitors towards pani câ mèusa (or panino con la milza), a sandwich of hot spleen topped with salty cheese, or stigghiola, an intestine wrapped around a leek and charred on a grill. On returning north, they can tell their friends that the meat looked a bit ‘suspicious,’ but they still ate it, out of a sense of adventure. A cash-only stall balanced over a gas canister, next to a teenager selling contraband cigarettes, could never happen ‘over here,’ they can explain, but is completely normal ‘down there.’ In other words, they can boast that they have been to the ‘real Palermo,’ a claim that cannot be untangled from a form of Orientalism, or rather, Meridionalism: an idea that the timeless Mediterranean is the very opposite of contactless card transactions and food hygiene inspectors. Both of those things are everywhere in southern Italy too, of course, but they are filtered out by northern lenses.
These northern lenses are not looking out for the substantial French or Spanish influences on Sicily’s art, architecture, or indeed food. They are looking for a pre-modern Other on the extreme margins of Europe, something both medieval and Middle-Eastern. Many working in the city’s travel industry are happy to collaborate with tourists to help conjure this exotic vision. When checking into my apartment, the lady who handed over the keys told me in English, with a smile, that “we are in the centre of Ballarò, where you can hear all the market vendors shouting like Arabs.” It is still not uncommon in Lombardy to hear southern Italians referred to as marocchini, as though to accuse someone of being Moroccan were some sort of insult. In the centre of Palermo, however, the very same characterisation is being repurposed as a Unique Selling Point.