A Faded Rose From Days Gone By

As our Trinacria was a full apartment with a kitchen, Trish cooked bacon and eggs for breakfast. In Catania Edward been delighted to find that the hotel supplied us with a capital breakfast, in which genuine beef steaks made a conspicuous figure and like him we had been missing our traditional Aussie breakfast.

Palermo has a free CBD circuit bus that has a terminal close to our apartment. We went down to catch it to it's northern extremity from where we could walk to the Capuchin Catacombs but when we got there the bus was, according to the driver "morto" or dead. While we waited a number of Sicilian pensioners turned up to catch the bus as well and there was much heated discussion over what I imagine was the state of the local buses. This time there was no Japanese bus driver to put things to rights but a mechanic turned up and then a replacement bus which we all boarded and took off.

When we got to the top of the free bus circuit we walked the final kilometre or so to the Catacombs where thousands of skeletons are preserved wearing their owners finest last clothes, standing or lying in niches along the walls. Edward observed the ghastly ranks are clearly visible and show with hideous effect as one enters the vaults. These disgusting dried specimens of humanity are in every stage of mouldering decay. These catacombs date back to the 17th Century and remained in use until well into the 20th. They were quite macabre and Trish who had visited the Maltese Catacombs from which all the bodies have been removed, was somewhat taken aback as she hadn't realised what to expect. She advised me firmly that if our trip were to involve anything similar in future I should warn her and she would sit it out.

Palermo Cathedral 

By now Covid19 awareness had reached the stage that cafes were serving their coffee in throwaway paper cups rather than china ones. After a coffee we walked back through the city to the Cathedral. The fonts were empty of holy water, again presumably due to Covid19 precautions but many local visitors still went through the motions of  splashing themselves with the invisible water. Unlike many of the Cathedrals we had visited, that had quite austere exteriors, Palermo's is very ornate. For a small fee you can climb their 100 winding stone steps to the roof for a panoramic view of the city.

Palermo from the Cathedral roof. 

Palermo is in a beautiful setting surrounded by steep hills and clearly was once a beautiful city of ornate churches and palazzos. Like the Trinacria it's glory has faded considerably and it now appears poor, dirty and rundown. There are more homeless people here than we have seen previously but it appears that the Italian ladys' desire to appear stylish doesn't disappear with homelessness. We saw one lady living along with a number of other homeless folk in the arcades of  a public building, dress herself in black stockings, a black slit leg skirt and brush her hair into a swirl before setting off for the day. It's possible that the homeless today are worse off than in the past because there is a huge barrack like Victorian poorhouse in Palermo that is now offices. Presumably they had a lot of poor then too but at least they had somewhere to sleep.

In the evening we walked the sea front park where there were large numbers of families out enjoying themselves and as we had a kitchen we again cooked out own dinner at home. On the internet this evening there were more stories on toilet paper panic buying in Australia while things still seem orderly here.