The Attic

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

My earliest travel memories are trips to our family attic. As a young boy, I’d haul myself up a wobbly wooden ladder to read comic books under a bare, low-wattage lightbulb. Dusty cardboard boxes, holiday decorations and suitcases on standby kept me company.

Sepia photos glued in family albums took me sightseeing to a land of unknown—and unknowable. Ancestors whose ghosts are my inheritance swirled my imagination. It was as if I were on a journey to another country, to another civilization.

The Palazzo Butera, an 18th-century palace in Palermo, Italy, is an attic masquerading as a modern museum. Tucked in between avant-garde artwork, old paintings, vintage hand tools, rare porcelains and polished furniture, the museum’s catwalks and glass panels expose its rafters, crawl spaces, foundation, old pipes…the works.

Peeking at the museum’s private parts—its structural undergirdings—I am back in my childhood secretly rummaging through my dad’s attic-stored girlie magazines. Taking my wife’s hand, I pull her from one display to the next. “Best museum architecture ever,” I half-whisper.

The Palermo family tree is well-branched. Through the ages, the family has added Arab, Christian, Byzantine, Roman, Norman, Jewish and Italian family members. The city’s architecture, her churches, the art, her food are the children of countless cultural intermarriages. Like my parents’ home—half Victorian era, half contemporary residence—not fully one or the other—Palermo is wonderfully all its own.

Like a grand matriarch decked out for a family photo, the city is bejeweled. Exquisite mosaics from the 11th and 12th centuries decorate churches and royal chambers.

In a grandiosity of gold mosaics, the La Mortorana church fuses beauty and biblical storytelling. Shimmering archangels, kings, saints, scholars and Madonnas are gorgeous enough to stop me from accusing the church of being gaudy, garish, gluttonous.

In the Royal Palace, the walls, ceiling, flooring of the king’s antechamber are covered, top to bottom, with sparkly, opulent mosaics. A procession of stylized eagles, rabbits, cheetahs, peacocks, lions, geese and griffins goosebump my skin.

The Palatine Chapel’s mosaics are impossible to enjoy in a single viewing. Instead, I crane my neck to focus on the church canopy. In the same way I marveled at the structural joists in my parent’s attic, now I am admiring the craftsmen who gifted this church to future generations. My gaze fixes on Noah’s Ark, a mosaic message of universal care for all living things.

Leaving the serenity of the church pews, I step into the chaotic, crowded Palermo street scene. Shop windows with colorful ceramics beg for my money. Domed rooflines call me to prayer. Scruffy public parks with broken pavements pull at my ankles. Rusted balconies cantilever off crumbly buildings. Cars parked in rugby scrums block my passage. A Piaggio Ape three-wheeled taxi is a careening joy ride.

Palermo is a steamer trunk of treasures. Scuffed, dusty, dirty. Her aged leather cracked. Metal straps, rusted rivets, frozen clasps girdle her. Tucked into her corners, musty papers, broken crockery, tattered bits of cloth, yellowing recipes, the detritus of a long-lived, cosmopolitan life.

When I get home, I’m buying a trunk to preserve my travel memories. I’ll put it in the attic.

Click here for more short stories set in Italy.