A place of passage and settlement for different peoples and cultures, which have ousted each other over the centuries leaving their genetic imprint and royal monuments. A superb capital, undermined first by the centuries-old carelessness of the lords - " leopardes and lions " generally not very interested in public wealth but proud of their authority and fond of refined luxuries - and then by the rough voracity of the looters who substituted them in the exercise of the same arrogant power. It has always been magnificent in its palaces and churces, elegant and idle in the summer residences of the aristocracy, a mysterious combination of sullen austerity and splendour of colours in its landscape and character, drugged by the sun during the day and by the smell of magnolias and jasmine when night falls. Palermo is a town with many faces but it has an unmistakable as much as enigmatic identity. Tomasi is a privileged guide to an understanding of it. The writer leads us to the discovery of the aristocratic palaces, more precious and magnificient in their interiors than is revealed by their facades ( the inhabitants of Palermo are reserved and love secrecy also in the taste manifested by their architectures), he takes us to the places which witnessed the Garibaldian adventure that gave rise to Italian Unity and describes to us the atmosphere of that season. But Tomasi can also guide us through twentieth century Palermo, through the Belle Epoque town which saw elegance, lightness and creativity flourish again - Where he lived the happy years of a golden childood- and then, in a brusque upheval of emotions, to the town wounded by the last war. That is a crucial date for the writer himself and for the town: during the bombings that hit Palermo in '43, the palace where Tomasi was born and to wich he has a special bond was torn down too. Its difigured front still stands there hiding no longer the sumptuous and comfortable rooms, but the ruins under the open sky, like a monument to the horror of the war and to the neglect and decay to which, for years, a ruling class - the looters who came after the leopards - has handed a marvellous historical centre that only in the last few years had started to live again. It is the route through a century of history, wich takes us today's town, where the desolate sites not lacking the perverse charm of ruins still bear witness of the ancient and recent wounds but also alternate with larger and larger areas where the splendour accumulated during a millenary history flourishes again.

Treading in the prince of Salina's footsteps, between the prince of Lampedusa's two houses
A walk to the Colli
Other places from The Leopard