Part punic, part Phoenician, part Roman, part Arab, the city of Palermo is strong stuff. Snugly spectacular in its bay setting by Sicily’s Monte Pellegrino, it looks, as a garibaldino approaching it from the sea once said, like a city imagined by a poetic child. Colorful relics of Middle Eastern domination mix with the Norman and Baroque, so the back of a building might look entirely different from its front or sides.

This has always struck me as impeccably gallant: an acceptance of this, a pragmatic incorporation of that. Beauty, rot, and salvage. Renaissance palaces next to hovels, 194 churches, and the domed roofs of onetime mosques—all reminders of countless invaders. History is a tumble, a chaos.