There are seven of them and they are not versions of each other. That is the thing to understand before anything else, and it is the thing almost every account of the Aeolian Islands gets wrong. They are written up…
Archives for August 2026
The Best Time to Visit Palermo
May, June, September and early October. That is the answer, and if you stop reading here you will not go far wrong. Palermo sits on the north coast of Sicily, which makes it slightly kinder than the south of the…
Palermo, and the Hour the Market Wakes Up
I got to the market before it existed. Not before it opened. Before it was there at all. At ten past six Ballarò is a street, an ordinary one, with shuttered fronts and a man in a doorway smoking and…
Getting to Palermo and Around
Palermo is easier to reach than people expect and easier to get around than people fear. The airport transfer is straightforward and cheap, the historic centre is walkable end to end, and the only genuinely bad idea is driving into…
Day Trips from Palermo
Palermo is the best base in western Sicily and most people never use it as one. They give the city two nights, see the chapel and a market, and move on. That is a reasonable trip. It is also leaving…
Mondello and the Beaches Near Palermo
Palermo has a proper beach twenty minutes from the cathedral, and it is better than a big city has any right to expect. Mondello is a wide crescent of pale sand between two headlands, with water that stays shallow and…
The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo
I am going to write this one plainly, because it deserves that more than it deserves atmosphere. Under a Capuchin monastery on the western edge of Palermo there are around eight thousand bodies. They are not in coffins and they…
Monreale from Palermo
Monreale is eight kilometres and four hundred years of argument away from Palermo. William II built the cathedral here in the 1170s, and the usual explanation is that he did it to spite the Archbishop of Palermo, who had a…
Where to Stay in Palermo
The neighbourhood question matters more in Palermo than in most Italian cities. Not because anywhere is dangerous, but because the character changes street by street in a way that catches people out. Two hotels four hundred metres apart can give…
The Best Things to Do in Palermo
Palermo does not have a list of ten famous things. It has about forty half-famous things, most of which are better than they sound. Here is what I would actually do, in the order I would do it. The wider…
A Palermo Itinerary: 2 to 4 Days
Palermo rewards a plan more than most cities, because the good things are scattered and the middle of the day is unusable in summer. The shape that works is simple: sights in the morning, something indoors and cool in the…
Palermo Street Food and the Markets
Palermo has the best street food in Italy and it is not a close contest. This is not a city where street food is a novelty layered on top of restaurants. It is the older thing. People have eaten standing…
