Palermo

I haven't written for a few days.  Toarmina was very beautiful but tourism had over-cooked it and it lacked soul. I couldn't feel it anyway if it was there. There must be locals who live lives beyond tourism.

By contrast Palermo has soul.  I even saw an animated argument on the foreshore with shouting and stamping of feet. When I returned they kissed each other goodbye.  Sometimes I remember on rare occasions when Angelo was provoked by a stranger he'd hold his hands in the air and roll his eyes back and shout out in defence.

The door to where I'm staying is a large brown one about 10 foot tall, on a narrow seedy looking laneway called Viccola di Cassaro Della Madonna.

It's up narrow stairs 3 flights where Marjolein, a Dutch Artist has some Airbnb rooms. Mine is a little appartment with bedroom, study, kitchen and bathroom.

Marjoleins artwork adorns the walls. One of them is 12 squares of fabric. It's called 'mother and son' she says.
It's 11 aprons surrounding 1 shirt. Says it all!

Another is of Madonna and Child. Sacrilegiously she's donned the Maddona in a red tracksuit. She said when she donned an apron, she still looked holy but the tracksuit made her look like a working class mum of today, even so she wore the rose's on her head.

I gave her the copy of Rosie's Ep on it with This Town written about Palermo. She was so taken with the cover.

My early evening stroll took me around surprise after surprise which I've written about on Facebook.

I think about This Town. Santa Rosalia, Rosie's namesake, is the Saint of this town, a 12 year old martyr attributed with saving the town from the Plague. I didn't know that when I named Rosie. This Town has allusions to it.

I named her Rosalia because of a library book I'd been reading to Nikki just before Rosie was born. A Boat for Pepe was written by Leo Politi, and Italo-americano who wrote and illustrated children's books about communities living in the USA, be they Latino, Chinese or Italian.  A Boat for Pepe was about a Sicilian fishing community living in Monterey.

Pepes father is a fisherman, whose boat gets stuck in a storm at sea. The villagers bring forth Santa Rosalia to bring Pepes father back to safe harbour.

So even though the family connections to Sicily are the east coast, this series of events has built us connections to Palermo.

It intrigues me the histories of migration and all that we take with it from where we come from.  It's the history of the world because migration has never stopped. I like that Leo Politi wrote about this in the States or that Kavisha Marzzela formed a choir with Italian Nonnas in Perth and Melbourne.  Then Kavisha, a musicologist, found that Australia was preserving dialects that had changed or moved on in Italy. They sung the old songs that Italians ceased singing.

Now it's a world of cell phones and selfies, a world where we are more rapidly becoming the same.