It was another glorious morning but, instead of walking back along the seafront for our morning walk, we decided to head back into the heart of the old town to revisit the sights we seen on our walking tour in the hope they would be less crowded.

The first revisit was to the Fountain Pretoria, otherwise know as the Fountain of Shame; I had forgotten to mention this one in my earlier post. The statue is located between an old Monastery and a Convent and there is an underground tunnel connecting these two buildings. Our guide told us yesterday about how the monks and nuns would ‘visit’ each other and, if they were caught, they were chained naked by the neck and left to starve in the tunnel hence earning the title of ‘shame’. The other title of shame comes from the fact that the people of Palermo were furious about the cost of the statue and cried out ‘shame on the government’ for over-spending on its purchase.

We went back past the 12th Century Church of Saint Catald and then all the way up via Vittorio Emanuel to the site of Porta Nuova, one of the gates to the walled city. This particular gate was commissioned in 1583 to celebrate the victory over the Ottomans, as can be gathered from some of the carvings. We stopped off for a coffee on the way home and I failed again with my iced coffee request; I literally got an espresso with some lumps of ice in it. I’ll have to keep working on this.

The plan for our day was to visit the Cathedral and Ballaro food markets. The €15 ticket for the Cathedral included a number of different sections including the crypt, various museums, the Treasury and a roof walk. You could spend hours visiting all of the sections of the Cathedral and the vast display of art and artefacts became a bit overwhelming, especially in the heat. However, a few things stood out on this visit: seeing the tomb of Frederick II and the crown of his wife, Constance of Aragon, given these two as had featured so much in the history of the places we’d seen thus far on our Italy travels. The roof walk, accessed up a very steep and narrow set of stairs, gave a great view over the city giving us a fuller appreciation of how Palermo is nestled on the coast and behind various mountain ranges. The other cool feature within the Cathedral itself was the meridian line. Giuseppe Piazzi, a Sicilian astronomer who discovered the major asteroid Ceres in 1801, was commissioned to build the meridian line within the Cathedral. The Archbishop of the day had wanted to educate the people about the importance of noon as Italy switched how it measured time. Prior to this period the twenty four hour clock was set to begin at sunrise meaning that every place had a slightly different time. Piazzi drilled a small hole in one of the cathedral domes and marked the position of sun light shining through on the cathedral floor at the sun’s zenith each day. The twentyfour hour clock could now be calibrated from midday and then related to calibrations in other places such as Rome. The meridian line contains 12 astrological markings and each is illuminated at midday in the relevant month of the year.

It was getting on to lunchtime by the time we left the Cathedral and so we headed towards the Ballaro markets, about a 5 min walk away. Ballaro markets are one of the oldest in Palermo and thought to date back to the 10th Century but the current layout only dates back to 1468! The name is derived from the Arabic name for the market when Islamic farmers sold their produce here and, hence, it resembles an Arab suk. The markets were a rather dizzying experience as we tried to crawl along the narrow street crowded both sides with numerous stalls and with vendors calling out to sell their wares, in a fashion known as abbanniate. It was a complete sensory overload with full-on colour, noise, things, and people and we didn’t last too long; we just did a quick lap up and back and sampled some of the typical street food; arancini for me and sardines for Mark. We also managed to score an iPhone charger for 6 Euros, which compared quite favourably to the one I bought in Nardo for 100 Euros, and I bought a sleeveless top given the approximately 20 kg of clothing in my bag was almost entirely unsuited to this type of heat and humidity. It was then time to head back to the cool and quiet of the apartment for a rest.