The ageless charm of Palermo

Opinion

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This article was published 12/01/2024 (605 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PALERMO, Sicily — This place is old. Older-than-Rome old. That’s just going back to the Phoenicians, nevermind the Mesolithic inhabitants whose carvings can still be seen in the grottoes of Mount Pellegrino.

Remarkably, the Palermitano remain fluent in their history. Though it would be well near impossible to forget it. One has only to look at the Byzantine, Saracen and Norman layers of the city — sometimes within the same building — to get a sense of the cultures that have mingled here over millennia, that mingle still.

Or, just breathe through the nose in the Kalsa. Smells like an education.

Even the football here is infused with the past.

Stadio Renzo Barbera, the Resuttana ground where Palermo FC play their home matches, is named after the club’s much-loved late president, Il Presidentissimo, whose great-grandfather happened to be one of the principal builders of Teatro Massimo — the iconic opera house and setting of the penultimate scene of The Godfather Part III.

Renzo is posthumously remembered as “The Last Leopard,” a nod to Sicily’s most famous novel as well as the island’s old noble families whose reception of Italian unification was, shall we say, mixed.

The stadium is also, and perhaps even better, known by its more distant sobriquet, La Favorita, which references its location on the “favourite” estate of Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, who arrived in Palermo in 1798 after being chased out of Naples by the French.

The late 18th century might as well be yesterday in the northwest of this island. The Sicilian Football Association — like those of Tibet, Greenland and Monaco, unrecognized by FIFA — has a jersey modelled on the Flag of the Sicilian Vespers, which recalls the uprising against Angevin rule in 1282. That’s far.

Palermo, like Sicily as a whole, has tended to be the plaything of foreign powers. So it’s really not surprising its football has also tantalized the big movers beyond these shores.

In 2022, Renzo Barbera’s nephew Dario Mirri sold an 80 per cent stake in Palermo FC to City Football Group (CFG) — the holding company within a holding company that manages a strip mall of clubs including Manchester City, Girona, Troyes and New York City FC It was a transaction that valued the club at roughly €13 million, or two-thirds of Erling Haaland’s annual salary. In other words, pocket change for the controlling Emirati royal family.

The upside is obvious.

For the lost coins in their chesterfields, CFG now have a presence in Italy’s fifth-largest city (bigger in population than Bologna, Florence and Genoa, for example) and possess one of the best-supported clubs in the country. Even modest investment should see the Rosanero catapulted out of Serie B and back into Italian football’s top flight.

The downside? Well, there isn’t any. At least, not for the faceless majority owners. In Palermo they have yet another enterprise to help bear the risks of the flagship club in Manchester, another asset over which to spread the potential fallout from the Premier League’s investigation into alleged financial malpractice.

In broader historical terms, CFG’s was just another takeover in what is quite likely the most conquered city in Europe.

It was for agriculture that the Romans came, and because the Carthaginians were here; the Muslim Aghlabids because the island aligned with their possessions in North Africa, and to get one over the Christian Byzantines; the Angevins simply because the Pope preferred them to the German Hohenstaufens. (Goethe, citing the three continents to which it points, said, “Sicily is the clue to everything.”)

Manchester City’s parent company because, and not dissimilarly, the planting of colonies supposedly makes the empire grow stronger.

Until it doesn’t. Which is something the Palermitano know from experience. There’s always another invader conspiring to displace the last one, a different capital for the city to serve — be it Athens, Rouen or Constantinople. Or East Manchester.

Palermo FC have already been sold more than half-a-dozen times, and they will be again. If CFG can put them back into Serie A, fantastic. If not, maybe the next owner will. And if not, well, there are worse things than going to Stadio Renzo Barbara for Serie B football on a warm winter night, especially after a slow Saturday of seaside walking, orange picking and visiting La Vucciria to buy some fish caught mere hours before.

When your memory is long, you tend to have both patience and the capacity to enjoy life’s simple pleasures. It’s the sort of duality that makes a place uniquely tantalizing, eternally pursued.

Palermo is obviously a football town. This is Sicily, after all. The game is just one of the things, and honestly among the more minor ones, that liven its ancient, winding, international streets.

Yes, CFG have come; and yes, someday they will go. Isn’t it heartening to think that when they do, their presence in the history of this place will have been about as noticeable as a scratch in the stone of Castello a Mare.

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