Island Hopping 2024: Palermo, Cooking with the Duchess, A walk to the Fountain of Shame

This morning we joined the owner of this Palace, the Duchess of Palma for a trip to one of Palermo’s open air markets where we helped purchase the ingredients for a meal that we prepared back in the kitchen of the palace.  Sandy and I were joined by eight more people who had signed up for this experience.  After preparing and cooking a huge meal, we all sat down in her elegant dining room and enjoyed what we had created.  The Duchess is an excellent cook, a diligent teacher, and a captivating story teller.  During the meal and later guiding us through the part of the house in which  she resides, she shared with us the intricacies of inherited titles, the history of the Palace, and the life of Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa the author. 

The Green Grocer

The Duchess' fish monger

The duchess insisting on quality

She gets her herbs from the Palace's terrace

Chopping Basil

Master (the Duchess) and student

Stuffing the sardines

Sardines stuffed and ready to bake for 15 minutes

Sardines before anything was done to them.  Looked good enough to eat just like this.

 The cooks

Our menu consisted of: Panelle, Busiate coi broccoli arriminati, Sarde a beccafico, Insalta sicieana di arance finocchi e olive, and Gelo di mandarino.

The dining room

The Pasta

The Sardines

Mark and I were pretty much the star of the show with our dessert.

In the evening Sandy and I walked from our apartment, through much of the old city, to Quattro Canti (Four Corners ) which is the heart of the city.  Along the way we passed a number of churches, interesting buildings and fountains.  It was a fountain, in fact, that we had set as our destination.  That fountain, the Fontana Pretoria, is known also as the Fountain of Shame.  This, because the many nude statues that are part of the fountain discomforted the sisters of Dominica who were enclaved nearby.  The sisters were so offended by this blatant display of immodesty amongst the statues that they, with hammer and chisel in hand,  knocked off the cause of their discomfort.  Never repaired, so stand the male statues today, broken men, regretting  when they dared present their altogether to the sisters of Dominica.

It is not just that Palermo has so many churches, which it does, it's also that they are all so big!

A little piazza, directly behind me ... a church

Sandy noted that some of the vines on one balcony reach out and become greenery on someone else's balcony

La Passeggiata has begun.  More and more people came out on the street just to walk and talk.

Church

A quiet park about five minutes from our apartment

Garibaldi, the unifier of Italy

The fountain of shame in front of another church

The fountain

Some of the offending statues

Aside from its shameful story, it is a pretty fountain

Leaving the fountain we joined La Passeggiata and on that walk back to the apartment we found a restaurant that served pizza. It was Friday so it had to be pizza.  This had been a good day in Palermo. 

Pizza with olives, artichoke, mushrooms and ham.