PALERMO STORY

A married British university lecturer in Palermo is hesitant about his affection for his adopted city—but convinced of his love for a similarly entangled Sicilian woman.

Handsome, easygoing, and dull in that way particular to British academics, Nick Stirling (or “Neek,” as his long-suffering, never-satisfied wife Paola calls him) goes off into the old part of town to retrieve the wallet that was picked from Paola on the city bus. The irascible Sicilian journalist cum Good Samaritan, Dante Genovese, who found the stolen item, is not at home when Nick arrives, but his attractive live-in lover, Lea Maselli, gentle, soulful photographer of Palermo street scenes, is, and the attraction between them is instant. When Nick gets home, the shrew Paola, instead of being grateful, rejects the wallet with a strident “I can’t stand contamination,” and the stage is set for Nick’s love affair with Lea and, indirectly, with the chaotic but magnificent city of Palermo. Characters and subplots swirl around the percolating affair: Nick and Paola’s daughter Guila is unhappy at school in Bologna, and their son Sandro is incommunicado. Paola’s mother is being sent off to a nursing home, Lea’s friend Flora is being harassed by the Mafia for protection money for her ceramic shop, Maurizio, the rug dealer down the street, is defying the ancient tradition and refusing to pay the local thugs. Newcomer Marks, a British journalist who, coincidentally, lives in Palermo, earnestly but too obviously intertwines events and people, making an effect like that of a stone skipping across a pond: only the surface is disturbed The difficult issues of adultery, betrayal, violence, and abandonment are glossed over; the result is a sweet love letter to Palermo and a plot that borders on fable.

Paola sums it ups best: “It’s all that English reserve.”