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Our
pal Juergen of Random Good
Stuff and For 91 Days is in Palermo,
Italy when he visited a fantastic little museum of puppets called the
Museo delle Marionette.
He wrote:
The glory days of puppet theater are long since gone, obsoleted by more modern entertainment options like TV and movies. But Palermo is one of the few places that you can still catch a show, with a few family-run theaters continuing the tradition. We’re definitely going to at least one. But first, in order to learn a bit more about the art form, we visited the Museo delle Marionette.
In 2001, UNESCO added Sicilian Puppet Theater to its list of Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity. Sicilian performances are usually centered around knights and princesses, dragons and Christianity. Epic Norman ballads like The Song of Roland provide much of the material for the island’s puppeteers, who inject a fair amount of humor in their performances and also invent dialogue on the fly.
... but all I kept on thinking was: What's up with the puppet with the belly face?
Link - Thanks Juergen!
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The last time we checked in with Michael Powell and Juergen Horn at For 91 Days, they were preparing to leave Bolivia and move to Palermo, Italy. Of course, part of soaking up a culture is the wonderful food in the different places they’ve been. It turns out that the people of Sicily love fried food.
We’ve already sampled an unhealthy share of fried Sicilian delicacies, and plan on eating a lot more. The Ballaró Market, south of the Cathedral, is an excellent place to sample some cheap grub. We tried panelle, which are chickpea fritters thought to be Arabic in origin, and crocchè: mashed potatoes and eggs covered in breadcrumbs. But my favorite was perhaps the rascature, a dish which literally translates into “scrapes”. These oddly shaped balls are a mixture of the panelle and crocchè, and whatever else can be scraped off the bottom of the cooking pan.
The thought of eating the fried “scrapes” from a little stall in a street market shouldn’t be appetizing, but my stomach grumbles as I type. I wants them rascatures, and I wants them NOW!
Although you can’t actually taste them, you can read about and see pictures of the different dishes at their blog. Link
For a small fee, you can tour the underground catacombs of the Capuchin monastery in Palermo, Sicily, where 2,000 well-dressed but decaying bodies, mostly from the 19th c., are on display. Nobody knows exactly why they have been preserved.
From the February issue of National Geographic:
“Their jaws hang open in silent yowls, rotting teeth grin with menace, eye sockets stare bleakly, shreds of hard skin cling to shrunken cheeks and arthritic knuckles. These people are mostly small, their arms crossed as they sag against the wire and nails that hold them upright, their heads lolling on shoulders, bodies slowly collapsing with the effort of imitating a past life…”
