It all starts in Pallermo
We asked everyone we met, and no, they have not seen White Lotus.
This island has no idea what is about to hit them in 2023. The hoards of American tourists coming to Taormina and Palermo will be a boon for these communities, despite the chaos, they will bring.
But chaos is the essence of Palermo - maybe it’s the Americans who should be worried.
Palermo doesn’t seem to believe in street lanes, crosswalk signs, and no one followed traffic laws, if they even exist.
Vendors at the Ballaro Market calling out their goods
A morning stroll feels like you’ve stepped into a game of Frogger - dodging cars, praying you catch the driver’s eye and they stop. Usually they get 2 feet from you before their momentum haults.
The only immutable law in Palermo, and Sicily for that matter, is Siesta from 2pm to 6pm. As our favorite tour guide, Rick Steves, likes to say, it’s the longest in Europe.
Chaos is part of the charm and soul of Palermo - it’s an ancient port city that’s arguably the most conquered in the world. In 2,700+ years of existence, it has been ruled by more than 17 nations, making this town and the whole island different from the rest of Italy. It’s long history of various rulers presents itself in the food, people, and even language. One Sicilian we met in the market told us, in fluent Italian mind you, that he “doesn’t speak Italian very well, he only knows Sicilian.”
Everywhere you look in this city you see the Greeks, Romans, Moores, Normans, Arabs and countless other cultural leftovers from their “conquerers.”
The arches on the windows are different from Rome, the tiles on the church copulas are brighter than Florence, you feel as if you could be in North Africa in one moment, and Venice in the next.
A brief glimpse of Vino Veritas’ glorious wine wall
The people have darker features than anywhere in Italy, but especially northern Italians. You can see the influence of generations of Arabic, Spanish, and Carthaginian (I know I’m pulling from way back) in people’s hair color, facial features, and maybe even their attitudes.
Can they say you have been conquered if your cities still stand, your culture progresses, and your people are still enjoying life?
We spent almost a week here, strolling the “walking” markets (three in the city) and the pedestrian-only areas of Via Vittorio Emanuele and Via Maqueda. At one time the famous “four corners” intersection that marks these two streets intersection was so covered with soot, that you couldn’t make out the features on the 15ft+ tall statues - but in January 2023, these corners are alive, clean and thriving.
During this time we stopped at two of the three main wineshops (holiday hours stopped us from the third) and tasted dozens of bottles of wine.
Bottega Monteleone - All Natural and organic wines, all day long.
Vino Veritas - Modern, simple bites with a massive selection of wine.
Over ~20 different bottles of wine, and lots of broken Italian from me, we found incredible biodynamic wine producers within two hours of Palermo. “Quale è il milgiore, quale ti piache?” What is the best? What do you like?, is always my go-to question at every wine shop and restaurant. Drink like the locals, enjoy like the locals, and it is tough to go wrong. “Noi siamo nelle tue mani” - we are in your hands, is what I tell them.
We tasted the local grapes from this side of the island - Grillo, Catarato, and Nero D’Avola. We had filtered and unfiltered wines, with their natural hazy sediment. Nero’s produced more in a Pinot Noir style, bright cherry, and raspberry flavors, and some that would go toe to toe with the most robust Bordeaux houses mushroom, tarragon, sage, and deep umami flavors. The range of Nero is truly impressive, and we’ve felt how each winemakers express the underlying fruits.
On Saturday, with our list of initial wineries in hand and after last-minute emails out to the families that own them, we started our journey south of the city.
Once you leave the frenetic energy of Palermo, you are immediately dropped into hills that could be reminiscent of highway 1 in Northern California, driving from Palo Alto to San Francisco.
The sanguine roads make their way up into the hills at a steady climb over the next 25 minutes leaving Palermo heading South, with farms, villages, and rolling hills of vibrant green grass on both sides of the highway.
If the skies were not a crisp Mediterranean blue, and the grass not a punchy, young green, the landscape could be mistaken for the hills and cliffs of Scotland.
As we crest the first rolling hill, the highway unfolds over bridges and sometimes hugs the hillsides. Two miles away the highway breaks away from the hillside and juts out into the open air, suspended on escalating stairstep pilings, as it makes a full horseshoe shape. It’s a cool grey color of modern architecture, set against a hill of lush green grass and jutting rock reminiscent of the Mesa Verde plateaus.
Beneath us are small villages of communities no bigger than 200-300 people. Intermixed in the country villages and hills we pass, are countless buildings that are in various states of aging and decomposition. Some have all four walls but lack windows or a roof. Others are only four partially crumbling walls that immediately draw speculations about how many centuries, owners, and conquerors they have endured.
We are driving through history at 80 mph in our Fiat Panda. The mixture of modern infrastructure and centuries-old villages just adds to the latest progression of Sicily’s cornucopia of cultures and development
About an hour south of Palermo, we finally pull off highway 624 (strade statele) and start to make our way on the country round of SP12 (strada provinciale). We begin to see signs for Corleone, Sambuca di Sicilia and Contessa Entellina, before we run into a sign that looks like it has seen two decades of weather, which proudly states - “Le Vie de vino” or “The Road of Wine”
All around us are wine stocks and rich soil - a solemn image of leafless vineyards with rows or “filari.”
It is January, so the vines have earned their hibernation after a busy fall harvest. Vignaioli (winemakers) have cut back their vines to only the main rootstock. This single sprouting branch will be the lifeblood of next year’s harvest, with each knob on the solo remaining branch sprouting grape-growing branches that will be trained along the vineyard wires.
If you didn’t know what to look for, it would look like lush, almost black soil with orderly posts running for acres.
Without the leaves, they lack their quintessential vineyard feel to what looks like endless, unplanted farmland. Come April, more than half of the fields around us will be covered in orderly rows of grape vines that could be on any vineyard postcard.
