Palermo's swagger and scruffy charm

Set on a "glittering" bay against a sweeping mountain backdrop, Palermo is the most "adorable and underrated" city in Italy, says Stanley Stewart in Condé Nast Traveller. 

For millennia, the Sicilian capital was "central to a sprawling cosmopolitan world", and it has seen a dizzying array of overlords, from the Phoenicians and the Romans to the Arabs, the Normans and beyond. It is a place of "great swagger", like a stage set, with its "theatrical confusion" of ornate facades. But it has none of the "studied" finesse that makes some Italian cities feel like museums. It is "as untidy as life" – chaotic, irrepressible, and yet possessed of an air of "vulnerability", too, with "its past troubles, its shabby side streets, its relative lack of resources".

Today, however, it is seeing a "spirited renaissance" – making this an exciting time to visit. Palermo's cathedral is like a microcosm of the city – a fabulous hotchpotch of architectural elements, built by the Normans in the 12th century on Byzantine foundations, incorporating bits of a former mosque, and altered repeatedly in the centuries since. No less grand is the opera house – the third largest in Europe, after Paris's and Vienna's – and the city's great palaces, including the Palazzo Valguarnera-Gangi, where Visconti shot the dazzling, 47-minute ballroom scene of "The Leopard", his 1963 film of Lampedusa's great novel.

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But whatever you do, however, don't get too hooked on sightseeing. Palermo's magic lies close to its streets – in its colourful old markets, its small trattorias, its excellent pastry shops (try the ricotta tarts made from an old convent recipe at I Segreti del Chiostro), and so on. The city's opportunities – its low rents, unrestored buildings, and "sense of authenticity" – have recently made it "a magnet for startups". There's no shortage of new bookshops, bars and designer boutiques, while new galleries (such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sicily and the Gallery of Modern Art) have opened in old palazzi. Yet this doesn't feel like "gentrification" – just "new ideas fitting into Palermo's wonderful chaos".