A little Palermo culture in our day

Breakfast at Casa Stagnitta - fabulous coffee and an apple Danese...a coffee-flavoured Danish pastry with glazed apple and custard.  Scrumptious!  Lucky we're doing so much walking or I would be shaped like a bombolone by now!

We were heading for the botanic gardens, but were distracted by the Galleria d'Arte Moderna and spent most of the morning there.  The gallery is housed in a beautifully renovated former palazzo, former convent, displaying Sicilian art from the 19th and 20th centuries.  The displays are atmospheric and beautifully lit, with lots of free space to move around the works.  The exhibit path is not straightforward, some areas accessed across a courtyard or via an unmarked door - but there are many attendants and they ushered us along the path to ensure we saw everything in the intended order.  For most of our visit we were alone in the rooms - very special!  My favourite works were some landscapes by Francesco Lojacono, one of which included a feature from the Aquarium, an aquatic plant display in the botanic gardens...so now I had a point of reference for our visit to the gardens!

Taking Via Alloro we wandered towards the beach and along the foreshore road - Foro Italico - to Villa Giulia, a public park adjacent to the botanic gardens.  This was Palermo's first public park and it's really pretty.  Then into the Orto Botanico di Palermo!  Fabulous rocky gardens of cacti, the biggest I've ever seen, from all around the world.  There is also a preparation area with rows of earthenware pots of different cacti in various stages of growth - all basking in the sun.  Happy cacti, and happy palms too!  Wonderful alleys of towering palms, bordering plantings of an array of palms from around the world, including Australia.  But the stars of the gardens were absolutely the ficus macrophylla trees from Lord Howe Island, Australia.  There were no planting dates, but they were incredible, each a maze of irregular trunks and dripping aerial roots.  And we found the Aquarium - so now visited by Lojacono, Renoir, Wagner, Wilde...and Hayes!

Lunch at a street food stall...loving those pane e pannelle...3 euros all up!

Returning along Via Alloro, we visited the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia.  The gallery is housed in Palazzo Abatellis, the interior of which has been re-designed specifically for the permanent collection of Sicilian treasures dating from the middle ages to the 18th century - paintings, sculptures, silver works, diptychs, triptychs and so much more!  Fabulous.  Again, there were many attendants throughout the gallery to direct us up stairs, along verandahs, through doors, so that we saw the collection the way it was intended.  Loved it.