Palermo with two faces, the bright and the sumptuous, the degraded and the agonizing, one showing the sparkling buildings and one the shacks and shreds of misery along the roadsides. Palermo has a thousand cultures within it; Spain, the Moors, the Swabians, the Arabs, the Normans, the Angevins, it is one of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. There is no other place like Palermo that is so fully Sicily, in its archaic and contradictory aspects, in the unshakeable attachment of its people to tradition, in the special persistence of ancient culture in modernity. In the alleys of the historic center, where a thousand contradictions are seen as an acknowledgment to History, Art and Humanity, spontaneous artwork appears on the walls, to remain there, creating atmospheres rich in visual poetry, no less artistic than the rest of the city, underlining and emphasising the dual aspects that represent the city itself; poetry and memory, ancient and modern, beauty and decay.
