The happiest city and the city of intrigue in the halls dear to Wagner

There are those who have made a list of rooms that tell of intrigue, mysteries and oddities. Each issue has a story: of murdered spies, foreign journalists who disappear for asking too many questions about the dirty money of the Italian-American mafia, writers who die mysteriously. And of characters who populated the rooms, or rather the suites, throughout their lives like Baron Giuseppe Di Stefano who lived here until he was 91: condemned by the Cosa Nostra tribunal and exiled in luxury to save his skin.

The Hotel delle Palme, or rather to be precise the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes, in the heart of Palermo, is one of those symbolic places of a city that was (and often still is) capital, crossroads, hub. Le Palme, as the people of Palermo call it, is, according to some, the plastic representation of the very happy Palermo and the Palermo of intrigue. The English entrepreneur Benjiamin Ingham wanted his home to be as refined as it was refined, and he started its construction in the mid-nineteenth century. A building that the Genoese entrepreneur Enrico Ragusa transformed into a hotel in 1874 until it became a symbol of Liberty in the early twentieth century thanks to the genius of Ernesto Basile.

It is here, during his stay in Palermo between 1881 and 1882, that Richard Wagner found the inspiration to complete Parsifal. And it is also here that during the Second World War Charles Poletti established the Amgot headquarters with the corollary of opaque relationships and various types of plots. And it is also in these rooms that the great summit between the Sicilian mafia and the American Cosa Nostra was held in 1957: among those present were Giuseppe Genco Russo on the Sicilian side, Giuseppe Bonanno and Lucky Luciano on the American side. Sitting in a corner in the fireplace room is a young Sicilian lawyer from Patti: Michele Sindona.

At the end of the 1950s, what will go down in history as the Grand Hotel delle Palme scandal took place, an attempt at corruption that brought down the regional government led by Silvio Milazzo and therefore the Milazzism that had sent the DC into opposition with an unprecedented alliance between communists and MSIs.