"Cider with Rosalia" a Palermo Travel Page by CliffClaven

They say you never forget your first love, and that is perhaps why Sicily has always held a special place in old Cliffie's memory. It was the first foreign place he ever lived. After a three-day train ride from the cold autumnal gloom of northern Europe, he walked out of the station in Palermo on a warm October evening into a bewildering world of staring silence and strange cries, dark half-shadows and vivid colours.

It was a formative time in old Cliffie's life, when he discovered the Italians' ambivalent attitude to women as Madonna and Whore. A time when he would accompany a girl on her evening passeggiata, brother or sister five paces behind, and hear whispered revelations of family oppressions, suppressed desires and lingering hopes. A time when he would lie on a hillside with a Sicilian girl and her tumbling black hair, lazily watching lizards as they timidly ventured across dusty paths.