To properly introduce Palermo, CB’s newest location, we turned to our local experts: correspondent and photographer Francesco Cipriano and walk leader Maria Luisa. In celebration of the launch, we spoke with them about Palermo’s gastronomic scene, the special Sicilian relationship with food, and their favorite places in the city. Francesco is a writer and photographer born in New York to a family of Sicilian immigrants who then moved to Switzerland before finally returning to Sicily – the place, he says, that feels the most like home. Maria Luisa is a native Sicilian and a professional culinary guide. She got her culinary start from her grandmother, who taught her how to knead dough to make bread, how to forage for wild plants and how to appreciate a good glass of wine.

Descend the steps of Discesa del Caracciolo, leaving Via Roma behind, and you will find yourself in the heart of Palermo’s old Vucciria market, a micro-universe unto itself in which nostalgia hovers in the air and in the eyes of the locals. Typical Sicilian fatalism translates into the saying: “When the balàte of the Vucciria dry out.” The balàte are the typical stones that make up the floor on which the market stands: legend has it that – precisely because of the presence of merchants of all kinds who wash their workbenches at the end of each day – the floor of the Vucciria never fully dries.

The myriad walks around the streets of Palermo can stir up a variety of feelings – curiosity, awe, wonder. Strolling around the centro storico, the historic city center, one can’t help but feel that the city is drenched in history. The area is dotted with miracles; Phoenician and Roman vestiges, buildings dating from the Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Arab-Norman-Byzantine eras. Palermo’s oldest street, Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, was once called Via del Cassaro. The name Cassaro, which means castle, derives from the Arabic noun Al-qasr, becoming U Cassaru in the Palermitan dialect. The castle was the original city center and this street, connecting it to the seashore, was one of Palermo’s main arteries.