We love Sicily having been coaxed there for a holiday a few years back by the beauty of it on the Montalbano mysteries. To date we have only done the eastern coast and so we were keen to visit the capital Palermo in the North West.
It was an easy escape from the boat today and we were quickly off to the start of our walk. As we have in the past we had selected a walk to follow from the GPSmyCity app. This would take us to the highlights of the city and give us a bit of a taster to decide if we would like to come back.
We were somewhat spoilt by reaching the Cathedral of Palermo early on. This is an impressing and imposing looking building with an interesting architectural style. Even better was that for €5 you could climb the steps in the tower and reach the roof. It actually wasn’t that high but enough to give some good views across the city.
I had been saying for a while that one of the things I had been looking forward to when returning to Sicily was having an arancini. These are basically balls of rice with a small amount of filling such as cheese or ham and then covered in breadcrumbs and fried. It took us a while to find somewhere that was doing them having seen loads before we decided to stop for lunch but it was worth the wait.
After lunch we wandered around a few more of the sights but we’d basically done Palermo without travelling a bit further afield which we didn’t have the time for. So we made our weary way back to the boat having had a good day.
Palermo harbour is tiny and while our cruise ship isn’t the largest it still took some manoeuvring to back it out of it mooring and into open seas. The turning circle is tiny and it was pretty impressive to see such a large vessel basically reversed out.
Tomorrow Cagliari, Sardinia.