“Think of Barcelona when Franco fell. Think of Berlin when the wall fell,” he says. “When a dictatorship ends — when the mafia collapses . . . It’s a period of renaissance — short — it’s a window of possibility that you have to use to convert into something.
Return to Palermo
Once a jewel of the Mediterranean, by the 1980s the Sicilian capital had become dilapidated and dangerous. Now, freed of the grip of the mafia, a revival is under way
When Francesco Ficola was a young boy, his hometown, Palermo, was a city under siege. Once a Mediterranean trading hub and a jewel of the Belle Époque, it had been turned into a battleground for the Sicilian mafia in its internal rivalries and its war against the Italian state.
Ficola, now 37, recalls police checkpoints across the city and the historic centre virtually abandoned, its grand palazzos and Baroque churches falling into disrepair. Palermo’s population, which peaked at just over 700,000 in 1981, had begun a long, steady decline, as people left in search of economic opportunities and greater security elsewhere.
At 18, Ficola joined the exodus to the north, where he studied electrical engineering before joining Accenture in Milan. But after a lonely first Covid lockdown in 2020, he temporarily relocated to Palermo and was captivated by profound changes under way: the historic centre’s once-deserted streets had a bevy of new restaurants, bars and artisans’ shops. Dilapidated buildings were being renovated. New cultural spaces had emerged. The city seemed to emanate possibility.
Buoyed by his employer’s remote working policies, Ficola came back to Palermo for good last year, hoping to support the city’s regeneration. Besides his job, he has launched a craft gin that uses a Sicily-grown spice, sumac, as its key botanical. He and his partner — a Milan-returned lawyer — have just welcomed their first child.
“This is a wonderful city and though it has many problems, I am positive that we have the potential to go back to what we were at the end of the 19th century,” Ficola says over cocktails on a rooftop bar overlooking the Politeama theatre, built in the 1870s, and crowned by a statue of Apollo riding a horse-drawn chariot.
He is not alone in wanting to return. While other Italian urban centres wrestle with overtourism and related housing shortages, Sicily’s faded but compelling capital is re-emerging as one of Italy’s most vibrant cities, a dramatic turnabout.
Art historian Claudio Gulli, 37, who returned in 2016 after 11 years away, says “Europe rediscovered that there was a forgotten — or sleeping — capital, where you can still find affordable foods, houses, works of art . . . dynamism, enthusiasm that is completely different from all other cities in Italy.”
Gulli sees this period as an opportunity for Palermo. “Think of Barcelona when Franco fell. Think of Berlin when the wall fell,” he says. “When a dictatorship ends — when the mafia collapses . . . It’s a period of renaissance — short — it’s a window of possibility that you have to use to convert into something.
“There is space: you can create something here,” he adds. “You can find 2,000 square metres for an artist’s studio, where in another place it would all be brought by Prada, Gucci or Armani.”
Italian artist Stefania Galegati arrived 16 years ago from the north and jokes that she is now a “welcoming committee” for newer arrivals. “I was called by Palermo,” she says. “I had lived in Milan, Berlin, New York and I was tired of the type of relationship you have there — only directed to use for work. I wanted to have a slower rhythm.”
Stefania Auci, an author whose bestseller about the Florios, once Palermo’s richest business family, has been adapted into a mini-series by Disney+, describes her home city as “a time capsule”. “It’s a pleasure, especially in the spring, to have a long walk around in the early morning,” she says. “Palermo is a place in which you can find fresh bread, flowers, the smell of the sea, and of people cooking. Lots of stimulation.”
Framed by mountains and sandy beaches, Palermo was for centuries a lively Mediterranean commercial hub, where power, money and different cultures intermingled, resulting in what was considered one of Europe’s most beautiful cities. During the Belle Époque, it was a favourite destination for international royalty, aristocrats and captains of industry.
But the city was battered by the 20th century, with its shifting economic tides, war and tightening mafia grip. The Florios — who had been major benefactors of public projects — suffered the collapse of their economic empire at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1943, Palermo’s historic centre was heavily bombed by Allied forces. From the 1950s to the 1980s, swaths of the city — including Art Deco villas and charming parks — were razed by unscrupulous developers linked to Cosa Nostra in its notorious “Sack of Palermo”.
It hit rock bottom in 1992, when Cosa Nostra murdered Italy’s two most famous anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in massive bombings intended to display their control of Sicily. Yet the killings were a turning point, as Rome finally launched a ferocious anti-mafia crackdown and the public revolted against mob influence.
It hit rock bottom in 1992, when Cosa Nostra murdered Italy’s two most famous anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in massive bombings intended to display their control of Sicily. Yet the killings were a turning point, as Rome finally launched a ferocious anti-mafia crackdown and the public revolted against mob influence.
Today, Palermo is still not for the faint-hearted — or those seeking efficiency. After decades of notorious government corruption — when public works contracts were doled out to mafia-linked firms — public services are poor, bureaucracy thick, and time elastic. The number of residents is still dropping, in line with broader trends in Italy, whose population is ageing and declining.
Yet newcomers, returnees and young residents are revitalising a city recuperating from the Mafia’s reign of terror.
“There has been a cosmopolitanisation,” says Marco Picone, a University of Palermo architecture professor, who writes on urban development. “Palermo remains a city that can welcome young artists — and people looking for cheaper accommodation — better than most tourist destinations in Italy.”
For Galegati — then married to an African American — Palermo, with its multicultural ethos, offered a welcoming place to comfortably raise mixed-race children and easy access to nature. “Life is slower; the connection with earth is stronger,” she says.
Artist-filmmaker Beatrice Gibson, 46, her filmmaker husband and their two school-age children arrived in Palermo from London by car during the pandemic, aided by friends with links to the city. “It was that typical Palermo warmth: people were saying ‘why don’t you come here?’”
The couple has settled in for the long term, buying a large living-and-working space that was empty for years. “It’s not like a northern American, northern European, neoliberal metropolis. It’s something completely other than that,” Gibson says. “Capitalism didn’t really take hold here . . . you feel a different energy that is very visceral, sensory and compelling.”
The town now buzzes with new initiatives, from co-working spaces for digital nomads to alternative film, theatre and literary festivals and art exhibitions. Many of these activities are held at a disused industrial park, whose empty workshops and warehouses have been converted into lively cultural spaces.
For some, the creative, constructive engagement with a city in flux is one of Palermo’s strongest appeals. “Things are not so defined yet,” says Galegati. “I like a lot of the holes of the city. Holes are empty spaces. And empty spaces are possibilities.”
Yet Palermo’s voids could fill rapidly. City centre apartments are being bought and renovated for use as Airbnbs. Late last year, the eccentric Japanese billionaire Kaoru Nakajima raised hackles by renting out some of the city’s most prestigious cultural sites for his four-day birthday extravaganza with 1,400 guests.
Tourists are arriving en masse, with some 1mn cruise ship passengers expected this year, up from 460,000 in 2017, and likely to rise further following the recent renovation of the cruise ship terminal to accommodate three ships simultaneously, with capacity for up to 18,000 passengers a day to disembark.
All this has led to fears that Palermo could lose its current appeal as a living, liveable city and end up as a museum piece or — like Venice, now charging admission to its centre — a theme park. “Tourism doesn’t have to be the first economy,” says Gulli, “or else we arrive to the dead point of Venice, of Florence.”
Architect Michelangelo Pavia, raised in Milan by parents of Sicilian origin, arrived in 2010. “I had an emotional relationship with this city,” he says. “I am earning less than I earned in Milan but I am saving more and my sense of wellbeing — mental, physical, psychological — is far higher.”
Pavia co-founded a shared workspace, neu [nòi], in the erstwhile stables of a 17th-century palazzo in Palermo’s traditional Arab quarter, known as the Kalsa. The space has drawn European and Italian professionals working remotely in diverse fields, from energy efficiency to human rights. Among them is Palermo native Giuliana Geraci, 34, who worked for a publishing house in Milan but moved south in 2021, after her employer agreed to let her work remotely with occasional visits to headquarters.
“Milan was a beautiful experience, with extraordinary people, but it was not my home,” Geraci recalls. “I always had a very deep relationship with Palermo — not only my family, but the city itself — and I always left here with a heavy heart, asking myself ‘why can’t I live there?’”
For her fellow returnee Ficola, Palermo also offers something far harder to find in Italy’s northern cities: the prospect of having a home with space to raise a family. “The quality of life and opportunity you can have here is far better compared to cities like Milan, where, if you want to buy a house, good luck!”
Though Geraci acknowledges the poor state of public services, she is optimistic. “Lots of people like us, in our generation, are more aware of these limits,” she says. “They will work to change the city in a better way.”
Across town tucked in a corner of the Mercato del Capo food market stands Le Angeliche, an elegant restaurant founded by Veronica Schiera, 39, her cousin, Floriana Lo Bue, 35, and two female friends.
The restaurant’s initial start-up capital came in part from Resto al Sud, an EU-funded scheme to support entrepreneurship in Italy’s under-developed south. It serves traditional Sicilian cuisine, using old family recipes and local ingredients, in a space filled with artisan crafts.
Before Le Angeliche opened in 2019, Schiera — who was raised near where Borsellino was killed and still remembers the sound of the bomb — was anxious that the business could attract mafia attention. But the friends joined Addiopizzo, a local association whose members pledge to resist mafia influence, and to refuse demands to pay protection money — the so-called pizzo — that was a standard operating expense for Palermo businesses in decades past.
“We cannot say [Cosa Nostra] has been completely eliminated, but their grip on the city has been interrupted,” says Dario Falzone, a Palermo city councillor. “The mafia system is becoming smaller and smaller, and it has a different approach compared to the past. It works in the shadows.”
Today, an Addiopizzo sticker adorns Le Angeliche’s door, alongside endorsement stickers from various culinary groups. “If you are approached . . . you are obligated to call the police,” says co-founder Chiara Napolitano, 28. But Schiera says the restaurant has not faced any harassment or untoward demands so far. “When they come and see the [Addiopizzo] sticker, they know this is a place that will not give in,” she says. “It is a deterrent.”
Of all Palermo’s new residents, none attracted as much attention as the art professionals and collectors Massimo Valsecchi and his wife Francesca Frua De Angeli, who have made a home for themselves and their extensive art collection in Palazzo Butera, the former seafront residence of the princely Branciforte family.
The Valsecchis — previously based in London and flitting between there, Milan and New York — were captivated when they first visited Palermo in 2014, with its layers of cultural influences from different waves of migration. They also saw huge potential in the derelict palazzo, co-owned by numerous Branciforte heirs.
In 2016, they purchased the property and began a restoration. “When I told people that I was leaving London, leaving New York, leaving all the best of western civilisation to come to Sicily, they said, ‘are you crazy? Are you putting in danger all what you have done in your life,’” Valsecchi recalls.
Now, the beautifully renovated palazzo serves both as the couple’s home — in stunning private quarters — and a museum for their eclectic collection, which includes antiquities, master paintings, modern, contemporary and decorative arts. Valsecchi jokes that he is now a “prisoner” of the museum, which last year drew around 38,000 visitors, including many from the international art world.
Valsecchi hopes the palazzo will serve as a “laboratory for ideas”, inspiring others in a city that he considers “the most interesting place of the moment” given its dynamic mix of European, Middle Eastern and African influences. But he also worries about Italian politicians now seeking to bring heavy industrial development and more tourism to Sicily.
“The beauty of Palermo is an endangered species,” he says, sitting on a bench in his courtyard. “For 250 years, everything has been frozen so it is in a limbo . . . What Sicilians need is to have a future — but to have a future related to the great resource of their history and their culture.”
Amy Kazmin is the FT’s Rome correspondent
