Two women have stopped to talk beside a low cart stacked with wooden crates. One wears a loose brown jacket and wide dark trousers, the other a black jacket and tall boots. Their hands are up mid-conversation. A shopper with a gray backpack passes close by, and on the right there’s a produce stand with bright red fruit and a red plastic crate underneath. It’s a photograph of a market, though your eye goes to the conversation first. The women have found just enough room to stop, and everyone else goes on around them. You could walk through Palermo’s historic markets looking for the best panelle and come away remembering a moment like this instead.
At Ballarò, in the Albergheria neighborhood, the market spills from the area around Casa Professa toward Corso Tukory. The stalls take up a good stretch of street, and the vendors’ calls, the abbanniate, carry farther than you might expect. A visitor hears a great rush of noise. Someone who shops here regularly can probably pick out a familiar voice from half a lane away. There’s a social life in that familiarity. You ask what’s good today, somebody tells you how they cook it, and the person waiting behind you has an opinion about that too. A hot panelle sandwich gives you a perfectly good excuse to stay put for a few minutes and listen.
At Capo, come in through Porta Carini and take Via Carini slowly. The market continues through several streets, but in the narrower stretches there’s barely room for the shopping, the talking and the people trying to get past. That closeness is part of the experience. A conversation at a counter can reach halfway across the lane, and stepping aside for somebody puts you right next to whatever they’ve stopped to look at. Capo is worth visiting on an ordinary morning, when a bag of vegetables still has to get home and there’s a limit to how long anyone can stand around talking. Though, of course, someone always has one more thing to say.
Vucciria makes room for another kind of gathering. Around Piazza Caracciolo and along Via Argenteria toward Piazza Garraffello, the old market streets also draw people out for drinks, food and music in the evening. The social side of Palermo’s market streets comes through in two more photographs. In one, a guitarist plays beneath a green awning while a man facing the musicians stretches both arms into the air. Some people lift their hands with him, while others stay in their chairs.
In the other, the crowd has filled the lane beneath a striped umbrella. A woman in sunglasses raises her hands, a man in a yellow-and-blue sweater looks back over his shoulder, and someone holds a phone above the heads around her. The pictures catch two ways to join in. You can sit at a table, or you can stop in the street until you’re part of the crowd.
If you have a day for the markets, spend the morning in Ballarò and Capo and come back to Vucciria in the evening. Leave a little time between stops. The food will tell you plenty about Palermo, especially if you ask someone what they buy and how they prepare it. Then stay where you are for a minute. You might notice how many people get as far as the end of a stall, spot someone they know, and forget where they were going.