To behold the sensuality and softness of  Giovanni Boldini's 2.2 metre high portrait, dated 1924, of “Sicily’s most beautiful woman," Donna Franca Florio, in the warm light of the Tyrrhenian sea on the ground level of one of Palermo’s splendid Belle Epoque inspired buildings - Grand Hotel Villa Igiea is a pleasure and its story fascinating.

The dented Red Fiat Nuova 500 only just fitted on the corner of Palermo’s Via Riccardo Wagner and Via Principe Granatelli  just in from Via Roma: one of the capital’s elegant 19th century wide thoroughfares created in the jumbled historic heart as part of the city’s renewal after Italian Unification. And I can imagine that little car could have just run the length of this well designed arterial of Palermo.

The regular traders, who travel from village to village, set up a market place in Piazza Matteotti, Polizzi’s garden piazza in front of the 16th century Church –“La Chiesa del Carmine” every Wednesday morning.

It is just down from the village’s Piazza Umberto along Via G Borgese. And, shoppers stroll Via Borgese’s length on their way to the market stalls stopping to chat and take in the vast view to the valley below and the lower slopes of the majestic Madonie Mountains.

The two stone blocks which Zia Gina- the driver of that the little blue Fiat - uses as steps when she climbs over the metre high stone wall which separates her house from the ancient garden of Polizzi’s now ruined 12th century Norman castle are steep and move a little.  But Gina says, with a glint in her eye, that that is how she enters her garden every day to work the mountain soil, to plant vegetables, to weed and to sit beneath soaring pine trees on a time worn stone bench. We joke that only a mountain goat could climb this wall. She smiles as she recalls that her nick name is “Capruzza” and it has been all her life-   it  means little goat.