Four days in Palermo with the Fujifilm X-E5

Palermo in July is a negotiation with the heat. You get the streets from seven to eleven in the morning, you give the middle of the day back to the city, and you get it again from six until the light goes. Four days of that, with the Fujifilm X-E5 and the XF 23mm f/2.8, and I came home with more frames than I expected.

I had no itinerary. Just a rough list of things I wanted to see and a lot of empty hours to walk into.

The Sicilian rhythm

Nothing in Palermo happens because you want it to happen. Shops open when they open. Lunch takes two hours. The middle of the afternoon belongs to shutters and closed doors, and if you fight it you just end up sweating in an empty street with nothing to photograph.

It took me a day to stop fighting it. After that the trip got much better. I shot early, I read in the shade, I went back out when the sun dropped and the walls started throwing long shadows.

Mornings at Bar Timi

My favourite spot of the whole trip. Bar Timi sits on Piazza della Rivoluzione, a small square slightly off the main tourist current, and I ended up there almost every morning.

The owner runs the place with his wife and a lot of the food comes from their own farm in the south of the island. The croissants are worth the walk on their own, especially the pistachio one. If you want something less sweet, they also do toasts with omelette, mozzarella and tomato, which turned out to be exactly the right breakfast before four hours of walking.

The real reason I kept coming back is that it's a good place to do nothing. A coffee, a book, a table outside at eight in the morning while the square slowly wakes up. That hour, before the heat becomes serious, is the best part of the Palermo day.

The cathedral

The cathedral is the building everyone photographs, and for once the reputation is deserved. It's a strange object: Norman, Arab, Gothic and Baroque pieces stacked on top of each other over eight centuries, and none of it quite matches. That's what makes it interesting to shoot.

I went twice. Once in the morning, when the facade is in shade and the details on the arches read well, and once late in the day when the whole stone front turns orange. The lawn on the south side gives you enough distance to fit the building into a 23mm frame, and the row of palm trees along the fence makes a good foreground.

Inside is calmer and much colder than the street, which is its own argument for going in.

The Norman Palace, and other ways to escape the heat

The Palazzo dei Normanni is the practical answer to two in the afternoon. Thick walls, cool rooms, and the Cappella Palatina, which is covered floor to ceiling in Byzantine gold mosaic. Photographing it properly is hard because the light is low and the ceiling is far, but standing in it for twenty minutes is enough.

The rest of the palace has the royal apartments and a few collections that are worth the ticket even if you came in mostly for the shade. Go early in the afternoon. The queue gets long and it closes earlier than you think.

Getting lost in the alleys

This is where most of my photos came from. Not the monuments, the streets between them.

The historic centre is a grid that stopped being a grid a long time ago. You turn off Via Maqueda and within thirty seconds you're in a lane two metres wide with laundry overhead, a scooter parked against a doorway, and a cat asleep on a chair that belongs to nobody. Half of it is falling apart, half of it has been repainted, and the two are usually on the same street.

The light is the reason to walk it. Palermo's sun is warm rather than white, and it bounces off the stone instead of flattening it. Late in the afternoon you get these long hard shadows across ochre walls, with reflected light filling the dark side just enough to keep the detail. That's the whole look of the trip for me: warm stone, deep shadow, and usually one small figure walking into it.

La Cala at sunset

La Cala is the old port, a small basin full of boats right at the edge of the historic centre. In the middle of the day it's just a marina. At sunset it becomes the best place in Palermo to shoot.

The light comes in low across the water and hits the buildings along the quay, the masts cut it into stripes, and everything you point the camera at has a long shadow attached to it. People come down to sit on the wall and do nothing in particular, which is exactly what you want if you're photographing them.

I went two evenings in a row and stayed until well after the sun was gone, because the twenty minutes after sunset over the water were better than the sunset itself.

Pistachio spaghetti from a street stand

The best thing I ate in Palermo cost almost nothing and came out of a street stand: spaghetti with pistachio cream. It's thick, salty, green, and completely different from what the name makes you expect. Sicilian pistachio is everywhere on this island, in croissants, in gelato, in pasta, and this was the version that stuck.

Palermo's street food has a reputation for the harder stuff, spleen sandwiches and fried offal, and you can absolutely go that way. I went for pasta in a paper tray standing up in the street and I'd do it again.

The film recipe

I loaded Last Summer Roll on the first morning and left it there for four days. It's a Classic Negative recipe by the Italian photographer Emanuele De Luca, with a warm white balance shift and a strong Color Chrome Effect, and it turned out to be the right call for Sicily. Warm without going orange, dense reds and blues, and it handles people well, which matters when half your frames have someone walking through them.

The second custom slot stayed on Classic Cinema for video. I filmed a bit in the alleys and around La Cala, and a lot more in Cefalù two days later.

Everything you see here is SOOC JPEG, no RAW, no editing after the fact. I've written before about why I shoot JPEG only, and a trip like this is the argument: I was in a cafe at eight in the morning looking at yesterday's photos instead of sitting in front of Lightroom when I got home.

The easiest beach from Palermo: Isola delle Femmine

Palermo has no real beach of its own, so at some point you take a train or a bus out to find water. The one I'd send anyone to first is Isola delle Femmine.

It's on the line that runs towards the airport, so the opposite direction from Cefalù, and it takes about 40 minutes from Palermo Centrale. The ticket is 3,30 euros, 6,60 return. From the station you walk down through the village and you're at the sea in five to ten minutes.

The water is clear enough to see your feet on the bottom, and you're looking straight out at the small island the place is named after, with the Torre di Fuori Isola delle Femmine sitting on it. It's a good swim and a good frame at the same time.

Mondello is the famous one and it's closer to the city, but you need a bus to get there. San Vito Lo Capo is the postcard beach and it's two hours away by bus. Isola delle Femmine sits in between: a bit further out than Mondello, far easier to reach if you don't have a car.

Next stop, Cefalù

If you're in Palermo for more than two or three days, take the train out. This part of Sicily is easy to move around by rail, and Cefalù is an hour from Palermo Centrale for a few euros.

I went late in the afternoon to catch the end of the day there, and it turned into one of the best photo evenings of the trip. That one has its own post.