Palermo

The reason we went to Palermo was because of the international gelato festival called Sherbeth and there were so many flavors it was crazy! My favorite flavor was purple rice. We went two nights in a row and we had some good ones and some bad ones. We tried about 25 flavors each night and the cones were very small. These are our favorites: profumo di sicilia, pepe giapponese, sorbetto gianquse, caramello al sale e vaniglia and, infuso di ortica.

Also while in Palermo we went on a no mafia tour to learn about the history of the Mafia in Sicily. Our guide Ernesto told us, when someone says they are from Palermo people think they are associated with the mafia, but actually it is way more complex than you may think. The mafia is a group of people who would go into a store and ask for pizzo. Pizzo is when a shop owner pays the mafia a monthly amount for protection usually depending on how big the business is. If it a small business they would ask for maybe 50 euros a month but if it is a larger business they would ask for more. The mafia used pizzo for a couple reasons in the additions to the money. The reasons were: to gain control over the neighborhoods and in exchange for protection the shop owners owed favors such as letting a mafia member work for them. In Palermo, up until the early 90’s 80% of the businesses we still paying Pizzo to the mafia. A group of young adults got together and started putting up anti mafia stickers around the city with this slogan: “Un intero popolo che paga il pizzo e’ un popolo senza dignita” which in English means: “A population that pays protection money is a population without dignity”. This anti mafia movement helped people realize they could stand up against mafia that control the community. still to this day there are people how pay pizzo but moset shops don’t and you know because they will have a sticker that says audio-pizzo.