Palermo and "legalita"

During the day that we recently spent in Palermo, the local television news reported an event in favour of "legalita". In the context of the influence of the mafia in Sicily, this idea that the "rule of law" is something to be valued has a very serious meaning.

However, at the time we visited, Palermo was in the midst of a crisis - over the collection, or, more accurately, the non-collection of its rubbish. I couldn't work out from the news coverage the reasons for this, but it was so severe that in some places the piles of rubbish in the street had been simply set alight as the only way of removing them. Volunteers and civil defence personnel were being brought in from all over Sicily to help collect the rubbish.

Negotiating the traffic in Palermo is also quite an interesting experience. Palermo city centre suffered from serious bombardment during the Second World War, and was never really re-built properly. It is a maze of narrow, often one way, streets, laid out in a square grid pattern, with the direction of traffic flow alternating between one street and the next. It took a little while to realise that the street on the map really was the narrow turning, barely the width of a car. I proudly managed to drive to within a couple of blocks of our hotel .... and then was completely stymied by the one way system (well, one way streets, system suggests a degree of planning that probably wasn't really there). Whilst consulting the map, I asked Zero to read me the name of a street that I couldn't see from the driver's side of the car....

Ah, bless.

We eventually gave up on the one way streets, parked up, and walked to the hotel. I explained at reception that we hadn't been able to find our way to the hotel with the car because of the one way streets. We were promptly given directions to the hotel from where we had parked the car - directions that involved driving the wrong way along no less than two one way streets. The added explanation was to the effect that "everyone does what they want".

However, it would be quite wrong to think that Palermo's traffic is utterly lawless. There is a kind of lawfulness about it - exemplified by the fact that, during all our meanderings up and down the one way streets, never did we come across a street blocked by a parked car. It's just that there isn't much connection between the lawfulness as practised and the official rules of the road - and once you realise that, everything works out fine.

I really was proud of being able to drive a car into the centre of Palermo, park it in the cortile at our hotel, and drive it back out again to the airport ... without a scratch.