This post contains over a hundred photos! Enjoy.
It is said that Sicilians feel things intensely and quickly. The island demonstrated it as soon as Lulu and I arrived in Palermo, the capital. Just as we were headed out of Arrivals, an intense hailstorm came out of nowhere, covering the ground with pea-sized icy beads, and in the time it took me to pull out my phone to check the weather, it was all done, gone, and the sun came out to melt it. None of my fellow arrivals seemed surprised, perturbed, or at all phased out. They just waited by the sliding doors like they were waiting at a red traffic light.
Change must be in their DNA like nowhere else. Right from my apartment balcony, I can’t stop looking at it. The Royal Palace stands majestic, sunlit, and clearly put together over centuries. John Julius Norwich once described it as “an architectural hotch-potch which fails to impose any overriding personality.” But I think this is its very personality. What else can you expect from a place that had its beginnings in the 8th century BCE, and was added on, upgraded, re-decorated, and rebuilt many times since?