Bella Kalsa

The Kalsa neighbourhood blends with the city's Arab history and at the same time laps against the waterfront of Palermo's historic centre. The house overlooks Piazza della Magione, significant for the city not only for its ancient history, but also for being the place where two of our fellow citizens to whose memory we are most attached grew up: Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Here, their legacy can be breathed. But the Kalsa is also a place where astonishing monuments and sumptuous Baroque façades of ancient nobility intertwine with winding alleys like snake tails slipping down to the sea, or where intersecting roots between earth and sky of mastodontic trees devour squares stretched out like sheets to dry in the sun. And again, the Kalsa is a place of life, the real life of the people, of children playing in the square and the streets, of mothers and fathers on the benches amidst the chatter and of the nights, the clubs, the live music in the streets, all in a mixture of Sicilian and Italian and other various languages that meet and sometimes recognise each other because they had already met in a previous life.