On a Trip Through Sicily, Old Secrets and New Surprises

by Cindi Sutter, Founder & Editor Spirited Table®—During her sixth visit to the island, one editor realizes that a little help from the experts goes a long way.—Content provided by ERIN FLORIO—January 10, 2022

Two hours after arriving in Palermo, I am standing under centuries-old chandeliers and surrounded by gold-gilded everything inside the Galleria degli Specchi at the Palazzo Gangi. The mirrors on the walls and the ceilings, the velvet curtains, and cumulative opulence of it all draws—and deserves—comparison to Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors. Gangi isn’t a place I could have discovered alone. Like many of the quiet moments in this wild city, this 300-year-old palace appears suddenly and magnificently, found around the corner from a nondescript alleyway. Its discretion is fitting for a city whose walls feel thick with the stories of millenia-worth of conquests and scandal.

Photos by Getty

Palermo’s buildings carry the visible scars of World War II but its doors reveal palaces still owned by princesses descending from the House of Bourbon, which ruled here for over a century. Underneath the city, a network of tunnels have been both a playground of sin for naughty nuns and monks and escape routes for Mafia-precursor the Beati Paoli. Suffice it to say, it’s a cunning, clever city that requires a decent amount of know-how to crack. Fortunately, I’m with Marcella Amati, a whip-smart, quick-tongued Palermitana guide with eyes so knowing they could carry centuries of urban tales and wisdom. It is her long and trusted relationship with the princess who lives at Gangi that got me through the door. Being here is the first of many moments that let me get closer to Sicily than I have been able to on any previous trip.

 I’m traveling with Authentic Exploration, a specialist travel agency run by Gary Portuesi in New York City. The son of Sicilian immigrants, Gary has spent the last two decades bringing Americans to Sicily and the boot, on tailored itineraries that he designs after careful talks with would-be clients; Marcela is one in his army of specialized guides all over the island. He and I made this trip official six weeks ago, on a phone call to discuss factors that would help him assemble a version of Sicily just for me. I let him know this would be my sixth trip to this largest Italian region. That yes, Palermo was important, as were artisans and history and the southeast corner of the island, home to Noto and Ragusa, which I had never explored. He ended our call with the words: “Be prepared for improv” and the heads up that an itinerary would be in my inbox in the coming weeks.

For millennia, Palermo was conquered and passed between the Phoenicians, Greeks, Arabs, Vandals, Normans, and Spanish before becoming the capital of Sicily, which would become part of an Italy unified under Garibaldi in the 1800s. It’s a no-brainer as a starting point to the Mediterranean’s largest island, itself closer to Tunis than Rome, and occupied by one Med power or another for over 10,000 years—meaning that cultures from the Middle East, Europe, and Africa have influenced everything from its food to its architecture to its dialect. As the gateway to western Sicily, Palermo is where I spend my first two nights and where I meet for the first time with Peppe, Gary’s business partner who would play driver, Sicilian encyclopedia, and dinner companion for me for the week. 

To visit the salt pans is to observe a centuries’ old practice, whose time, due to technology and opportunities elsewhere, may soon be up.

On our first full day we hit the road early, driving along the coastal highway toward the seaside town of Trapani, the industrialized suburbs of Palermo thinning out along the hills and coastlines the farther west we get. It’s a clear and mild late September morning, one that must feel like relief for locals after the long and suffocating heat of summer. Our destination is the Trapani salt pans that trace their origins to the arrival of the Phoenicians 2,700 years ago. Squint, and the silhouettes of Favignana and Levanzo, two of the three Egadi islands off of western Sicily, appear faint like shadows against the blinding Mediterranean sunlight. I’ve been here before, on a drive-by 10 years earlier while road tripping around Sicily with friends. I told Gary I could pass this time around. But he kept it in the program.

The last time I came here, all I did was glimpse the pink and blue salt pools on the shoreline from the car window. But on an actual tour, I discovered that a visit to these salt pans is a window into artisan cultivation. Here that means a choreography of men, bare-chested, in shorts and gumboots, shoveling tidy piles of sea salt into wheelbarrows that they then roll, wobbly atop the saline-inflected earth where a thin layer of water reflects with such sharpness that it looks like a sheet of ice, to a large mound at the edge of the pools. These workers, leather-skinned, with thick beards and faces hardened by a life’s work in the sun, will probably be the last to work in this way. Peppe says kids don’t come here looking to follow in their boot-steps. To visit the salt pans is to observe a centuries’ old practice, whose time, due to technology and opportunities elsewhere, may soon be up.

For the rest of this amazing adventure through Sicily; click here.