Midnight in Sicily

Our plane begins its descent into Palermo. The curve of the bay glows on our left, a soft necklace of lights against the dark water, while the mountains stand brooding around the city.

We’re back in Sicily. The still warm November air hits us as we alight the plane - a small announcement that we’ve left behind the cold, wet, grey of England and arrived somewhere that shares more DNA with North Africa than with Rome.

We take a (dangerously) quick cab into the city, along the highway where the Judge Giovanni Falcone’s car was blown apart by La Cosa Nostra, in 1992. I recall to the last time I was here, reading Midnight in Sicily and learning how a place so beautiful could carry such deep scars. How the island is a complicated subversive web of criminality and the law and not always necessarily fitting the bad and good tags that you’d associate with either.

There’s something undeniably pleasing about driving into a city at night. Streets hushed and shrouded in darkness. A solitary window lit by the bluish light of a TV. A tiny orange ember hovering outside a doorway where someone smokes. Traffic lights flipping colours like painted brushstrokes. A bar glowing softly, making you wonder what stories are unfolding inside. Landmarks illuminated like canvases in a quiet gallery, stripped of the crowds that swarmed them only hours earlier. A couple stepping out of a warm trattoria into the night, still slipping on their jackets.

Then there’s the AirBnb arrival ritual. You step out of the taxi hoping you gave the driver the right address, because nothing looks the same as it did on Google Street View. Nothing ever does at night. There’s the familiar dance with key codes and lockboxes, followed by the discovery that the building has no lift and both 20kg suitcases need to be hauled up four flights of narrow, badly lit stairs.

But then you open the door, and the place does look like the photos. Relief washes in: you haven’t been conned, and you can finally stop. After hours of travelling, of queuing for security, of boarding by standing in stairwells for no logical reason, of buying that unnecessary airport pint because what else is there to do for forty minutes and you can finally exhale.

The trip starts now. After a night of sleep in a strange bed, tomorrow it will truly begin.