has long wanted to travel in Sicily. Camilleri's books and Sciascia, Tornatore's films, ... There was a void in my experience of Italy: I never went to the south, which had become a word with a meaning vague, idealized. After the last Christmas I was finally able to leave for Palermo and stay a week in the city.
The flight, although he did it with Ryanair, was calm and we arrived late. Magnificent views of nearby island. The powerful wind that we felt the strong shock before landing. Palermo Falcone Borsellino airport to bus trip with the view down into a sea of \u200b\u200bcolor of wine, in the words of Sciascia, and abandoned buildings near the sea or left untreated and also examples of waste beaches invaded by the sea had left. How could they be so dirty? Upon arrival I
a North African man waiting with a car that had at least two decades and has brought me "apartment" that I had rented a month before and that was in the old town at the Ballarò market. The palace was in the middle of a slum that made me think of the streets of the poorest areas of Barcelona quararant'anni ago. The studio where I spent my day was not better, after having climbed up a narrow staircase, I entered a house rehabilitated materials with second-hand furniture and also hailing from the nearby flea market. The man told me how he designed and built by hand a wooden staircase to be able to rise to an attic where he had made the bed. I kept thinking Barcelona to my grandparents, where I did not know how many people could live in such a small space.
But when I looked out the window and saw a land with no buildings in between the buildings where the machines were out of order and parked alongside the road (actually an alley), a mountain of household waste waiting to be collected, I thought of Valencia and the Barrio del Carmen in the seventies.
Before there was a building the same. The second floor, outside on the balcony we could distinguish between the junk a network of the bed, a dresser and an ancestor satellite worn tied to the railing. The whole neighborhood was inhabited by immigrants who packed all the houses and even the old palaces of the nobility Palermo.
From the start, I arrived in Palermo was also a journey back in time and in my memory. I recognized many things that we have lived a long time ago and perhaps have been forgotten. It was a very special beginning of trip.
