Tag Archives: Palermo’s Quattro Canti

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Things I Like (2026)

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Adjusting the seat and side mirrors on a hire car ahead of the drive from Tullamarine to the Queenscliff Music Festival

Side 2 of the compilation album Whopper: Get Dancin’ / Shame Shame Shame / The Hustle / Up In A Puff Of Smoke / Jive Talkin’

The community library, a house-shaped wooden cabinet mounted on a post, at the Corny Point Cricket Club gate

The Doors’ ‘Light My Fire’ and its three-and-a-half-minute organ and guitar solo

Finding the chocolate and note Claire’s hidden in my lunch

Arriving in Athens’ Syntagma Square following a 57-hour journey through Melbourne, Beijing, and Istanbul

A $10 Op Shop shirt

The Barry Jarman Stand at Woodville Oval

Sunset overlooking Santorini’s caldera

Listening to David Gray’s hymnal White Ladder album on a Sunday morning

Running through Palermo’s Quattro Canti wearing my Glenelg guernsey and hearing someone yell out, ‘Go, Tigers!’

Sausage, white bread, barbeque sauce

The introduction to ABC radio’s Conversations and it being someone I’ve never heard of

Running at midday along Glenelg North esplanade through a sea fog

Peter Buck’s banjo on the REM song, ‘Electrolite’

Buying Alex his first (legal) pint in the Broady beer garden

The massive Beijing Airport billboard for Grange Hermitage

Every Easter Sunday at the Wheaty, hearing my brother-in-law’s band, Don Morrison’s Raging Thirst, play ‘Grand Junction Road’

A banana on my drive to the Christie’s Beach parkrun

The Season by Helen Garner

Thinking about Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, and St John’s Wood, ahead of our London visit this Christmas

The cowbell on Grover Washington Jr’s ‘The Two of Us’

Being in our backyard and hearing the siren from Glenelg Oval

Nearly tripping over a clump of lava during the Mt Etna parkrun

Cornflake biscuit at The Broadway Kiosk, Wednesday afternoons

Alex and Max getting me Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde as a birthday gift

Italy’s three-wheeled truck, the Piaggio Ape

Claire telling me her ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ story

The Rawady’s Deli mural in Kapunda

A bottle of 2006 Rockford Basket Press Shiraz for Dad’s recent birthday

The game of squash in Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday

Vividly coloured bottles lining the wall in Athens’ Brettos bar

Feeling the bass guitar growl through the speakers during ‘Sukie in the Graveyard’ at Belle and Sebastian’s Adelaide show

Steering over the River Light just south of Kapunda and feeling nostalgic and happy that I’m home

A Carlsberg Elephant beer (7.2%) with old Kimba friends

The Sound of Muesli on 3D Radio, featuring fellow Unley Jets Footy club alumnus, Pete Wilson

The yellow and green dome of Palermo’s Church of San Giuseppe dei Padri Teatini

A clear and warm evening for Antigone at the Greek Theatre in Syracuse on Sicily

A half-time pasty from Snout’s bar at Glenelg Oval

John Doyle (Rampaging Roy Slaven) picking up Claire’s hat for her when it blew off on Balmain’s Darling Street and he had that knowing twinkle in his eye

The scene in Song Sung Blue when Mike and Claire are first rehearsing and she plays the piano line of ‘Cherry Cherry’

The warmth of the old floorboards in the front bar of Port Elliot’s Royal Family pub

Watching Claire interpret Pulp’s ‘Common People’ in front of Elder Park’s sea of people

Max completing his first three-point turn

Tim Lane opening the telecast commentary of summer’s very first session of Test cricket

Just avoiding a cobra on our Balinese scooter

Footy Almanac lunches in Geelong

During ‘Ol ’55’ by the Eagles when Don Henley and Glenn Frey harmonise on ‘Now, the sun’s coming up/ I’m riding with Lady Luck/ freeway, cars and trucks’

Drifting about in the Corny Point shallows with Claire

This December, stepping into The Coach and Horses, in London’s Soho for a Stella

The Waifs inviting their interpreter (Claire) onstage

Stumbling across a country cricket match, complete with white picket fence

An annual winter lunch with Kapunda boys in the Barossa’s finest pub, the Greenock

Grand Final week

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The Best Beer I Ever Had #27: Palermo, 4.27pm

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We’d had a decent day in Palermo.

Strolling the length of Via Vittorio Emanuele, we then descended into the catacombs. These burial tombs were initially for religious folk but then became a status symbol so others were placed in there, courtesy of their relieved relatives. Many were mummified. Most look unimpressed. Claire and I did not book a space each.  

Later, we visited Palazzo Abatellis, an art gallery housing the Virgin Annunciate, an Early Renaissance masterpiece. It’s yet another fecking religious painting. Great but sometimes I yearn for a godless soup can.

After such a day, especially in Europe, especially in their spring, especially upon a holidaying Tuesday, and especially anytime south of about 4.27pm, I am ready, as they say, to murder a beer.

I love Palermo’s Quattro Canti. Four extravagant Baroque facades frame an octagonal intersection where Via Maqueda meets Via Vittorio Emanuele. It’s pedestrianised with cruel little cobblestones designed to make you want to amputate your own feet later that very evening.

Locating a bar, I collapsed into a stool (tall chair, not a poo) on the street. ‘What will you have?’ I asked Claire. Browsing the menu she replied, ‘I reckon an espresso martini.’

The Italian lager, Birra Moretti, was my choice. Six hundred and sixty magnificent millilitres. It arrived in a jubilant, brown bottle. Beside it sat a heavy tumbler. It was two euros. The waiter motioned to me, seeking permission to pour my beer into the glass.

When outside of Australia, my vowels involuntarily lengthen and become nasal like I’m from Far North Queensland. It bemuses Claire. Instead of thanking him with a briskly confident, ‘Prego,’ I drawled a bogan-ish, ‘Pray- go’ as if Pauline were ventriloquist to my somehow stutterless puppet.

I was extravagantly pleased with myself even as the zealous waiter sloshed it in, nodded and vanished, leaving me to stare at a glass of foaming ice-cream for agonising minutes.

Zipping and strolling by our table, an endless human tide flowed up and down the street. Claire and I became an island in the stream. The air about us hummed warmly with bubbling chat. We’d a day remaining in Palermo before flying to Rome and home, so this was an early celebration and acknowledgement of the utterly engaging, exciting island that is Sicily.

I attacked my Birra Moretti like a man who’d just stumbled in from the months wandering a desert. It was delicious and my screaming feet were silenced instantly. After a day among the dead and the divine, and now just alone with my dearest in one of Europe’s great squares, it was a perfect coda.

It was the best beer I ever had.

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Sicily: Baroque but Physiologically Perilous

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Ape taxis are distinctive fun. They’re a scooter with a tray and cabin. In Italian, Ape means bee and not primate and is pronounced AH-peh. A nod to their industriousness, it’s a companion vehicle to the Vespa which indicates wasp. Designed and manufactured after the second world war, they helped Italy rebuild and are suited to the narrow, twisting lanes of the cities. How cool is this? The mere sight of one wobbling past is instantly cheering.

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Pedestrian streets return cities to their citizens. In Palermo and Catania, they’ve wrestled control back from vehicles. This is best seen at Palermo’s Quattro Canti. A Baroque square, it hosts buskers, weddings, gawping tourists, and probably thieves. Strolling down cobblestoned Via Vittorio Emanuele towards the harbour we pass The Navy, a darkly tempting bar.

Cobblestones — those evocative European symbols — are delightful to contemplate and photograph. However, they are horrifically medieval upon which to walk any distance. They’re romantic but physiologically perilous.

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The highlight of our Sicilian trip was Saturday. Venturing into the Mercato Ballarò, a famed food market, the noise is physical. Shouting and selling, music and meat sizzling on open grills — imagine tending these in a Mediterranean summer! The slender laneways heave with traffic and sensory assaults. Claire and I squeeze through together, gawking at the stalls groaning with non-refrigerated octopi and giant tuna and arancini. Orange juice — squeezed as you stood there — cost less than the 4 euro we were almost slugged in Catania for a tiny cup.

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Unbeknownst until too late, right next door was the Tatum Art Jazz Club & Ristorante. Opening on weekend evenings, we could’ve swung by for a Talented Mr. Ripley hour — minus the messy murder. Instead, 9pm on Saturday was Eurovision o’clock on the TV. Cue: much wailing and moaning and overwrought vocals plus cartoonish imagery and bombastic music. It was largely irony-free. Representing the Antipodes was our the Australian popster, Delta Goodrem. But what fun to see it as it happened — on the continent itself.

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With abundant love, Claire always secures atmospheric accommodation. In the Historical Centre of Palermo, we had a seventh-floor balcony from which we looked out at the Church of San Giuseppe dei Padri Teatini and its yellow and green dome. Our rooftop colleagues were wheeling and squawking gulls.

Giggling, Claire said, ‘They’re laughing at some very funny jokes.’ I think they were. What joy to sit on that narrow ledge with a Birra Moretti and a limoncello and plates of pasta with pistachio pesto (PPP in certain elite circles).

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The Sicilian capital is now among my favourites. Its insistent energy, compelling history, and painterly cityscape demand this. However, it’s also home to what we named the Sad Fountains of Palermo. Near us is one called the Fontana Pretoria or Fountain of Shame — think marble nudes on a ghostly building site — but the grimmest example is in the otherwise delightful Piazza Marina. This fountain was, I think, a dribbling garden hose and a horse — lame, bemused, and in a dying bush.

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Often, passing in a train or on foot we’d spy aged men leaning forward on a balcony. They’d be peering out wistfully if not glumly, neither smiling nor frowning. The lines between private and public lives are blurred here. Are they seeking company or fleeing it?

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Sicilian parks are grass-less but loved. This is the opposite of some London parks which are beautiful if entirely ornamental in that gruff signs forbid any human use. In transit to the Cattedrale di Palermo we bisected the Villa Bonanno. It’s unkempt with weeds, parched dirt, and irregular litter. However, it’s well-patronized and bustling with people sauntering, talking with spectacular animation, and eating gelato. Often, all three at once.

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Scampering through a golden twilight square on Sunday evening, we found a crowd bunching outside a bar. One loose circle chattered and drank with fearsome energy. And around what were they gathered? Yes, that’s right! A couple of green wheelie bins! Some were resting their beers on the plastic lids while they yelled joyfully at each other. This is why I love Sicily.