Quite a wonderful day today. I got to a place I've wanted to see for many years, and when the rain clouds drifted away, I got to see the mountains surrounding Palermo, spectacular!
During breakfast, I shared my street art pix from yesterday and Luigi, our host, told me to go to Mercato Vucciria, just a few blocks north of here, if I wanted to see more street art. The students from Firenze were gone this morning and in their place we had another German, a young man who is visiting volcanoes and taking closeup photos -- he's on his way to Mt. Etna, in eastern Sicily. We pointed out that Etna has been erupting lately, that he might not get as close as he wanted after all.
Mercato Vucciria is a pedestrian strip lined with curio and junk shops, used-book sellers and all kinds of food -- produce, meat and seafood. And funny street art. My favorite is a large foot made out of Swiss cheese, standing on a block of cheese and giving the thumbs up. A pair of socks floats randomly over a couple blue water drops and somehow I think the stinky socks are linked aromatically to cheese kid. Weird and funny.
So, explored Via Maqueda, which runs parallel to Via Roma, noticing a strong African and East Asian presence on the street and in the shops. The German couple had mentioned discovering a contemporary art gallery, but couldn't remember where it was. After a very funny conversation with a couple of guys at a museum I thought was the Risa Gallery, they pointed me back up Maqueda to Vittorio Emanuele, the direction I had just came from, to Piazza Bologna, where I discovered that Riso is closed, the next exhibit happening on Friday, when I'll be in Siracusa, if the travel gods are with me. Not disheartened -- I just had a quick conversation, in Italian, about contemporary art. And I noticed a half-dozen used bookstores in Quattro Cantu, the name for the intersection of Maqueda and Emanuele, where the four old districts of Palermo come together. People have a passion for books in Palermo.
But I was on another mission now. Find the stop for the bus to Monreale, home of the famous Duomo with its treasures of Byzantine art, and the ticket office for the Cuffaro bus line, which is going to take me to Agrigento on Wednesday. The area around the central bus station in almost every Italian city is a hot bed of traffic and rivers of people exiting from trains and flooding towards them, and Palermo being Palermo, the streets were pulsating with people and Pullman buses and hellion motor scooters. But the travel gods were with me. Found the AST bus stop for Monreale quick fast, got my round trip ticket and figured I'd have enough time to track down Cuffaro, use the WC in the train station and get an early start for Monreale, knowing that the cathedral wouldn't be open until 3:30pm and it was only a little after 12. Ended up going to the wrong ticket center for Cuffaro, and started getting my travel jitters and then calmed myself down when I realized I had the info in my notebook. So I got to the right address, learned that I could only buy tickets on the bus and learned where to catch it. Great! Rushed over to the WC, discovered that the cover charge is only 80 centissimi -- it's 1 Euro everywhere else (except for Venice, 1 Euro 50 centissimi). The turn style wouldn't take my Euro, but I just happened to have 80 centissimi, what a relief! And then realized I just missed the 12:30 bus to Monreale. No problem. I found a lunch place, ate a funky Sicilian pasta dish (round Cheerio noodles with tomato sauce, a bit of ham and cheese), and headed back for the bus, and it was waiting for me. And while I was sitting there, it started to rain. A clap of thunder and everyone in the bus jumped. Whoa, what's that all about?
Now, I neglected to mention an important fact. I opened my shutters this morning and discovered sunlight. Wow, where have I read about that funny yellow stuff that makes you feel good when it falls across your overcoat? I had to take the lining out of my jacket, I was getting warm this morning wandering through Mercato Vucciria. Weather started to cool down while I was eating lunch and got my umbrella out while I ran through the traffic like everyone else in Palermo, to get that bus.
The drive to Monreale was so interesting. Heavy, heavy traffic and the bus just crawled through the city, got out of town and started a slow climb up the hills that surround the city that I hadn't actually seen before because of the low rain clouds. Turns out, Monreale is a small, packed little city that lives up in those rain clouds.
Now, as I was getting off the bus, I saw these two women talking with a bunch of curious looking men at the bus stop wearing straw hats covered with flowers (I guessed they were German Catholics ... don't ask me why!?!), the women were saying they came from Berkeley, California, so I introduced myself and the three of us were sort of chummy as we followed the winding main street of town towards the elusive Duomo that everyone said was just ahead of us, but of course we couldn't see it until suddenly it was looming over the shops. And sure enough, it wasn't open for another hour. So we had coffee and talked about California and life in general and then they decided to check out the cloister of the Duomo and left while I was finishing my espresso.
Now, I had to use the WC. It's pretty common in Italy for unisex bathrooms -- maybe separate toilets for the sexes (not always!), but oftentimes a shared anteroom, with sinks, hand dryers, etc. Now this WC had been taken over by Italian high school girls, and a couple of their male classmates. When I opened the door and heard all of these chattering, laughing girls, I thought I had gotten into the wrong bathroom, but no, they had taken it over. Feeling a little old and foolish, I headed over for the cloister, bought my ticket and discovered that there was no WC there, so back I went to the restaurant, got back to the WC and it was the girls' turn to feel a little embarrassed and they fled en masse, with their boyfriends, leaving me the men's toilet all to myself. A very funny moment. Later on, in the Duomo, I noticed the kids were pointing to me and giggling.
The cloister was wonderful. I had seen photos in the art history books of the Romanesque carvings on the column capitals, but I had no idea each capital was unique or that the figures were so animated and articulate, retelling biblical stories or enigmatic fables or were, maybe, just fanciful decorative designs, totally abstract or cleverly packed with fat fowls or chubby griffins. I took as many photos as I could with my smartphone and felt enraptured. There was a heavy downpour, but everyone in the cloister was protected by the ceiling overhead and the figures were so charming and delightful, I really felt transformed. I ran into Deborah and Charlotte, my coffee buddies, and they were in the same place as me, just tickled and astounded by the carvings.
The Duomo itself was another one of those Byzantine master works which, like San Apollinaire Nuovo in Ravenna, has that curious flattened, schematic treatment of the human figure which I always thought was rather stiff and unemotional, but is, in fact, a very powerful means of expressing deep religious feeling in a very economical form. I know the Normans built the Duomo but I don't know how it came to be decorated by Byzantine artists. I know that Venice shared a love-hate relationship with the Eastern Empire and the commercial tie with Constantinople lead to an artistic exchange, and once the Byzantine empire fell to the Turks, Venice hosted the fleeing Byzantine artists. How the Normans and the Byzantines mixed in Sicily is a story I need to dig into.
The cathedral was a spectacular showcase tor the retelling of old and new testament tales, and the passion of Christ and all of the liturgical iconography that represents the core mythology of Christianity. Just the shear scale of the works was impressive.
Around 4:15, I said goodbye to my new buddies and trotted off to the bus stop, thinking the bus would leave at 4:30. Nope, it left at 4 and the next one wasn't until 5:30pm and now it was raining again. So I headed for a coffee bar, got a pot of chamomile tea, found a little table outside and decided to kill time by drawing. It was chilly and damp, but I thought, what the hell, I just had a great art experience and I'm dressed for the weather, I'm gonna sit here and draw and know the bus will get here yet. In fact, the driver recognized me from the drive before and said he would be leaving in twenty minutes, which gave me a little more drawing time, and then he tapped me on the shoulder and gave me a little wave of the hand --"Andiamo!" -- and back at the bus, I ran into the two gals from California.
Now this bus driver was a great guy. Charlotte and Deborah had gotten bus tickets, but for the wrong line and at first he wasn't going to accept them. But then he took pity on the gals and said he'd take their tickets. He could've been hard nosed -- as it was, the tickets weren't any good to him, but he let it pass and the women were happy and impressed at what a good guy he'd been. For all of the raw edges and frenetic pace around here, people have generally been really nice, helpful and willing to cut you slack when you need it.
We all walked back from the train station together and had a fun chat. Turns out they'll be in Agrigento the same time as me, on Wednesday. We laughed that we would see each other somewhere in the Greek temples. That would be nice. I liked their company.
Just a great day, all around. Thank you, travel gods!
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