Palermo Centrale – Catania Centrale

The eagle-eyed will notice I’ve skipped a day. One of the compromises in me having these crazy adventures is that I do sometimes need to work. I received a call directly from a customer of my customer, who needed urgently needed some assistance. There aren’t too many end users who have my personal mobile but this one does, which probably indicates their importance. To add to the fun, another equally high profile customer that I deal with had an (unrelated) issue a few hours later. They hadn’t called me but our service desk did. I’d not spoken to the first of them in 3 months and to the second in over a year. Just my luck!Anyway, my first full day in Palermo was spent working.

Happily the focus of the day was a concert in the evening, which was wonderful, but is really off topic for this diary. I’ll share a few images of this stunning building though. The visuals of the show were also very impressive.

The main aim for today was to get to the other large city in Sicily, Catania. There is now a direct rail service between the two, a long a line which was being upgraded when I was here two years ago. The train wasn’t until mid-afternoon so there was time for a bit of exploring before meeting up.

I’ve not been to the Palazzo Reale in Palermo before, though I’ve walked past it many a time. Part of it was closed today, but there was still plenty to see. It’s a quite traditional building, and beautifully proportioned, both inside and out.

The chapel is presently undergoing a huge renovation, but even with much of it covered up was impressive. I’m not one for religious buildings at the best of time, but the mosaics here are gorgeous.

As well as the palace itself, I hugely enjoyed an exhibition of the work of American photographer Elliott Erwitt. I’m not 100% sure what if any connection he has to this area but I loved the work. I recognised about half a dozen of the images, and his list of portraiture subjects was a bit of a who’s who.

I collected my bags and made my way towards the station. Palermo is such a city of contrasts. The area I had been staying in was adjacent to a clearly very poor area, but it is still beautiful in its way.

In this short visit I’d not so far been back to the wonderful market which runs in a line through the streets of the city. I had time for a look and to take a few pictures.

Gilly and I met at the station. On this occasion I was travelling on a “normal” ticket. I use the travel days of my Interrail pass where they can save me money and this trip might be 3 hours, but it was only €18. As I read this, I realise that we were so engrossed in conversation I didn’t take a single photograph on the way.

In Catania we were staying a couple of blocks apart. We met up for dinner after checking in. A local speciality is pizzola, which is two pizza bases with a filling, which in this case was chicken and broccoli. It was an interesting variant but way more than I could eat and on reflection the proportion of base to filling made it a bit dry. I liked the idea though.

It was drizzling slightly as we walked back to our accommodation, but still a very pleasant warm evening.