Palermo: A City of Light, Shadows, and Stories

Feature, Travel
C.S

March 31, 2025

“The popular neighbourhoods, the margins, that is where the true essence of the city lies.”

A Mystery That Does Not Want to be Revealed

Palermo isn’t a city that gives itself away easily. It doesn’t unfold neatly like a well-worn map. Instead, it demands something of you—a willingness to get lost, to listen, to dig beneath the surface.

For photographer Francesco Faraci, a Palermo native, this is what makes the city extraordinary.

“Palermo is still a city capable of surprising, of literally leaving you speechless for the quantity of humanity and stories it knows how to hide,” he says.

“I say hide because they are not easily accessible; you have to look for them, dig, question the walls, the light, the shadows.”

Faraci left Palermo once, only to return. The pull of the city was too strong, its contradictions too compelling to abandon.

He describes it as a place that teaches, confounds, and mystifies in equal measure.

“Some of its neighbourhoods, some of its ravines, carry with them a mystery that does not want to be revealed,” he says.

“I continue, despite everything, not to understand this city.”

The City as a Muse

As a photographer, Faraci draws inspiration from Palermo’s people and the way they exist within the city’s shifting light.

“I am very inspired by its people. By the grace and ferocity that they are able to communicate,” he explains.

“I am inspired by its light on certain days of sirocco wind, the one that comes from Africa and discomposes thoughts. I am inspired by its being a woman, one of those ‘feminine’ women, sensual, erotic.”

His work isn’t about capturing the postcard version of Palermo. It’s about seeing the city as it is: raw, complicated, beautiful in a way that defies easy categorisation.

“Showing Palermo for me is a natural fact, like breathing,” he says. “What I would like to communicate with my photographs has a lot to do with love, love without being do-gooders, also showing the shadows that this brings with it.”

Beyond the Tourist Trail

For those who visit, the temptation might be to stick to the highlights—the grand palazzi, the bustling food markets, the golden beaches just beyond the city.

Faraci, however, urges visitors to go further. “Get off the tourist trail, off the beaten track and get lost where the city ends and begins,” he says.

“The truest city still exists there, without superstructures. The most alive one, not mediated by hyper-tourism.

In Palermo, you have to lose your way to find something, let yourself be carried away by the flow of life.”

The places that capture Palermo’s essence, he says, are often hidden in plain sight.

“The popular neighbourhoods, the margins, that is where the true essence of the city lies.

“Difficult places, full of pitfalls, but that you learn to know little by little.

“You have to take the time to question them and, if you are lucky enough to know how to enter them, to know how to stay, discover what you didn’t think was possible.”

A City to Be Felt, Not Just Seen

For those trying to understand Palermo, Faraci has one recommendation: climb Monte Pellegrino.

“Certainly, if you want to ‘look’ at the city and how it can be enveloping, you have to visit Monte Pellegrino, look out from there and, perhaps, get an idea of it.”

But understanding Palermo isn’t just about looking. It’s about immersion.

It’s about walking its streets without an agenda, letting its sounds, smells, and stories wash over you.

For Faraci, the perfect day in the city is simple: “Doing what I am very lucky to be able to do. Losing myself and telling it, trying to go deeper and deeper.”

Palermo isn’t an easy city. It doesn’t offer itself up at first glance. But for those who take the time, who let themselves get lost, who are willing to embrace its contradictions, it’s a place that lingers, that unsettles, that demands to be told.