Just down past Palermo's renowned Fountain of Shame (Fontana della Vergogna) in Piazza Pretoria, in the city's historic heart, there is a little independent bookshop, Libreria Forense on Via Maqueda at no.185  which may have one of the capital’s most beautiful shop front signs.

And, it is run by an engaging true bookseller, Signor Renato Valenti.

It was a subsided section of the A19 (the low slung highway which cuts through the navel of Sicily and runs between Palermo and Catania) and a consequent detour up through the Madonie mountains to Polizzi Generosa that brought Australian Sicilian artist Eolo Paul Bottaro to Polizzi in 2015. 

Emotionally drawn to Sicily, the island of his ancestors, Eolo returned to Polizzi in 2016 and is there now, fueled with an unstoppable passion and curiosity working on his latest art project The Polizzi Project- his recreation of  Polizzi Generosa's lost (deliberately destroyed) statue from antiquity held deeply in the psyche of the people.