The Girls in Bikinis:

At first glance, the ten barely clad mosaic girls, on the floor of an ancient Roman villa in southern Sicily, do look like young women in bikinis: blonde, almost bare skinned, long-limbed and agile.

And since the 1950’s, these poised women have been known as the ‘Bikini Girls’ of the ancient Roman world; they possess an appeal.

The elegant muscular torsos of Michelangelo’s classic seated nudes, the Ignudi, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, twisting and turning in every direction are the inspiration for Sicilian potter, Giovanni D’Angelo’s simple twisted pottery seats: the Torsonudo (bare chested).

A recent collection of Giovanni’s Torsonudo seats, glazed and modern, created individually by Giovanni in his studio in Sicily’s Madonie Mountains, were exhibited in Milan at the HOMI Fiera Milan0 Lifestyle and Interior Design fair in January. The form of the seat, Giovanni stresses, pays homage, simply, to Michelangelo's twisting and bare chested seated Ignudi.

Saint Valentine (San Valentino), Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini, Lampedusa’s classic, The Leopard, and a cocktail called Sicilian Kiss all underscore love. And as the feast day of Saint Valentine, one of the world’s more known saints approaches love is to be considered.

I am intrigued as to who Saint Valentine was and must admit that a story of love, in all its melodrama, does resonate a little particularly when it involves a Sicilian literary classic, a Sicilian sonneteer and a cocktail with a name so daring as, Sicilian Kiss.

There is a tea house in Palermo which serves deliciously decadent Sicilian pastries and it makes for a quiet interlude when discovering the charming chaos of the capital. A little down from Piazza Politeama, in Via Nicolo Garzilli, it is a nice edition to the decades old Palermitan institution, La Pasticceria Cappello.