Flavia D’Anna, the artist behind this beautiful Palermo focused project, shares what inspired it
The new episode of Windows on Sicily focuses on a recently published collection of illustrations dedicated to the city of Palermo. It’s called The Palermitaner, a project launched in 2021 by artist Flavia D’Anna, a young woman born in the Sicilian capital. Flavia now lives in Barcelona and works in the marketing department of a large multinational company, but art has always been at the center of her world — a passion inherited from her parents.
Our conversation with her was a blend of images, politics, and deep truths about our city. Artists, as we know, have a particular way of perceiving reality; they see what others do not see and hear what others do not hear. Flavia lives, breathes, and notices art everywhere. Observation is her primary source of inspiration, a way of moving through the world that offers a social and political narrative unlike that of many others.
During lockdown, she found herself confined to her home in Barcelona, unsure how to fill her time. So she decided to channel both her frustration with that period and her enduring love for the city where she was born. Inspired by existing projects — The Tokyoiter, The Parisianer, The Napolitaner, and others — themselves reminiscent of the iconic magazine The New Yorker, she created a version dedicated to Palermo.
She began with her own illustrations and then expanded the project by inviting other artists to contribute, a progression that can be traced by scrolling through the project’s Instagram page.
We met with Flavia in a bar in the center, in Via Roma, next to the Teatro Biondo. She is leaving after spending the Christmas holidays in the city and is ready to return to Barcelona. Despite her love for Palermo, Flavia cannot bring herself to return to live there, as it is too “ruthless” and “neglected by the authorities.”
But the project stems from another consideration of hers, Palermo’s resistance to being neatly summed up — it just can’t be categorized or boxed in. The very aesthetic traits of its inhabitants are an example of this: “We’re all different. I’m blonde and you’re dark, for example,” she rightly says. Flavia adds to this heterogeneity a critique of the city’s cultural decline, where stereotyped symbols “that no one feels are their own” take center stage — cannoli and citrus fruits above all.
The (very successful) aim, then, is to create through illustration an authentic symbolism made of places, people, and habits typical of Palermo’s inhabitants — all of them anything but ordinary. The project tells stories of the city’s identity in which anyone can genuinely recognize themselves. There is an illustration dedicated to the 806 bus line to Mondello beach, one to the Palermo distillate Anice Tutone (drawn by Flavia), another showing a boy on a moped towing a horse, and a depiction of Piazza Garraffello in the old Vucciria district, a place where, until a few years ago, parties lasted until dawn. These and many other scenes emblematic of Palermo and its people make up the fifty splendid illustrations gathered in the book, which will soon be available for purchase in various formats on the Forward Edizioni website.
“The purpose of the project is this: to bring everyone together around something that unites us rather than divides us. A Palermitan is not only someone born here, but someone who embraces its nuances,” Flavia tells us.
“Poetry,” she adds, “comes from those who live in harsh realities, from the less educated classes who face difficulties and must survive.” But she cautions: “We must not define an ‘us’ and a ‘them.’ The problem lies in imagining ourselves as a different social class. We are Palermitans.”
The conversation drifted into political territory, though without the exclusionary edge that politics often carries. We try to press her a little on this.
“Everything is politics,” she replies. “Any topic that reaches everyone’s attention, any voice that reaches everyone’s attention, is political. The way you live your sexuality is political, the way you shop, what you watch, how you dress.”
Yet Flavia prefers not to frame her ambitious project in those terms. The Palermitaner is, quite simply, about the people of Palermo — and about those who feel different enough to embrace the city’s complexity.