Limbo Dancer

Palermo has its Pandora’s Box in Ballarò where a thousand cultures from East to West meet and live together. The marketplace is located not that far from the city center and from "Quattro Canti", the octagonal area created by the crossing of two of the main roads in town, Maqueda Street and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, where in the past age the aristocracy used to walk on Sundays.
By entering Via del Ponticello, which crosses Maqueda Street, you will soon get into the “Bronks” of Palermo as the disturbing graffiti over the walls suggest and I begin to realize where I ended up. The alley goes on and becomes Casa Professa Street, which leads to the market; here, we bump into junkies and dealers, prostitutes and pimps who don’t seem to notice us passing. Eyes start to lie on us, as we get closer: two girls with a backpack, trolley following, maps on one hand and cameras on the other, surely don’t slip through a community which lives on a precarious balance.
We still can get a glimpse of what they are thinking of us with a mixture of pity, curiosity and concern: “These two chicks don’t even know where they are”. Do we?
It’s 6 o’clock in the afternoon and the market is by now empty. There is not pretty much left on the stands of vegetables and fish. The merchants are chatting about the trend of the day (I can only imagine since they talk in a strict dialect, which I barely understand). There is one who greets me by lifting his chin, I greet back. We’ve been offered some weed but we refuse it; there is chaos all around, African kids play football on the street, their mothers call them down, trumpet sounds come from the pubs nearby and there’s smoke in the air, it’s like a raving jungle and we feel like tourists in a cage with lions. Sensations of excitement and fear for every step we take, smiling and trying not to be misunderstood or not to bother the residents. While keeping the trolley, Enrica manages to take pictures. There is a cat that gazes upon us: “What you’re doing here, girls?” I glance back at him: “Yes, I know, we do look like naïve but this tour was strongly desired even if totally unexpected.”
We get along smoothly, taking light steps not to wake up the sleeping dog. In order to experience fully a place, you have to explore its dark side. I don’t want to be a tourist, but to see the world through, so dense and various, so rich and poor, where everyone is dancing limbo on a thread under which there is nothing but despair.