PALERMO

Working our way through some of Palermo’s most charming seaside neighborhoods, we’ll explore the city’s enduring connection to the sea – as well as taste the food and meet the people that tell the old port area’s fascinating story. Our evening will start in the Castellammare neighborhood, home to La Cala – Palermo’s ancient port – which for millennia has been host to sailors, traders, and merchants, including a silversmith hand-hammering religious icons in his tiny workshop, which we’ll visit. To get started, though, we’ll duck into a century-old cafe that remains unchanged since it first opened, for a glass of aromatic Sicilian vermouth. Fortified by our aperitivo, we’ll make our way towards the waterfront and a bustling neighborhood institution for pezzo, classic to-go snacks made from a brioche dough that’s baked with a dizzying array of savory fillings and toppings. Stepping into the port itself, our next stop will bring us face-to-face with one of Palermo’s still working fishermen, who will give our group a chance to step into his colorful wooden boat and tell us about his work and how local fishing traditions are being kept alive. We’ll then continue through the backstreets to a street food specialist for a coppo – a paper cone – filled with pannelle, crispy fritters made from chickpea flour, and other fried bites.

Continuing on our way, we’ll join the locals at a family-run trattoria for a plate of caciocavallo all’argentiera, pasta with sardines and fried calamari, a beloved specialty of the neighborhood. Before the evening is over, we’ll get another taste of the sea at a neighborhood restaurant helmed by a young woman chef. Here we’ll sit down for a meal of freshly caught seafood and fish, served both fried and – more extravagantly – crudo, accompanied by some delicious Sicilian wines. But we’ll be sure to save some room for our last stop, a fifth-generation dessert maker in business since 1860, where we’ll get a taste of a true Palermo original, the Giardiniera, a three-layer gelato cake that evokes the colors of the Italian flag and created to celebrate the late 19th-century unification of Italy. It’s a fitting finish to a walk in an area where history and tradition is evoked at every stop along the way.