Set on a “glittering” bay against a sweeping mountain backdrop, Palermo is the most “adorable and underrated” city in Italy, says Stanley Stewart in Condé Nast Traveller. For millennia, the Sicilian capital was “central to a sprawling cosmopolitan world”, and it has seen a dizzying array of overlords, from the Phoenicians and the Romans to the Arabs, the Normans and beyond. It is a place of “great swagger”, like a stage set, with its “theatrical confusion” of ornate facades. But it has none of the “studied” finesse that makes some Italian cities feel like museums. It is “as untidy as life” – chaotic, irrepressible, and yet possessed of an air of “vulnerability”, too, with “its past troubles, its shabby side streets, its relative lack of resources”. Today, however, it is…
