Monday 26th September

So as predicted the right wing has won the Italian election and Georgia Meloni will become the country’s first woman prime minister. As her party “Brothers of Italy”, emanated originally from the Mussolini-created Fascist party we will see what this brings to Italy. Ms Meloni has tried to distance herself from the worst of right wing ethos as well as some rather extreme statements she has made in the past. She has modified her anti-EU stance as well as distanced herself from Mr. Orban of Hungary and Ms. LePen from France, but she will be allied with M. Salvini of La Lega who is very anti-immigrant as well as the dreaded 85 year old ‘bunga bunga’ ex-Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Hopefully she can control the worst excesses of those two. It is certainly a new era for Italy and the left wing has suffered a significant defeat in parliament as well so a rightward swing is inevitable and clashes with the EU seem to be inevitable.

Today, recovering from our food coma from the previous night’s dinner, we took it pretty easy and did very little until late afternoon. We did make some plans for the next few days and decided to stay here in Palermo until Thursday morning, then travel to Messina where we would spend one night in a hotel before taking the ferry over to the mainland on Friday. We also booked the hop-on, hop-off bus for a tour of Palermo in the morning.

Late afternoon we walked to the Mercato Ballaro which is a short distance away. We visited a Jesuit church on the way which was so richly decorated it was almost embarrassing. At the market we bought some coffee, milk, some fruit and salad. Then on the way back we had an Aperol spritz made with pomegranate juice which was refreshing. Then it was back to the apartment and reheating the remains of our huge Sunday night dinner to which we added a salad and some of the nectarines we had bought.

We then watched Italy beat Hungary at soccer in the Nations League before going to bed.