Palermo Food Events & Festivals
Palermo's food calendar follows its festivals and saints' days, each with its own street food and sweets. Here's what to eat, and when.
In Palermo the year is measured out in food. Religious feasts, saints' days and the changing seasons each bring their own specialities to the markets and bakeries, and the biggest of them turn the whole city into a street-food festival. If you can time your visit around one, do — and if you can't, a food tour will still catch whatever is in season.
Festino di Santa Rosalia (mid-July)
The Festino, held every 14 and 15 July, is Palermo's biggest celebration, honouring Santa Rosalia, the city's patron saint who is credited with ending the plague of 1624. For two days and nights the centre fills with processions, music, fireworks over the sea and, above all, food: stalls sell babbaluci (garlicky snails), sfincione, watermelon and mulberry granita late into the night. The street-food and evening tours are especially atmospheric around this time, though the city is at its busiest.
Feast of San Giuseppe (19 March)
Saint Joseph's Day brings sfince di San Giuseppe — soft fried choux puffs filled with sweet ricotta and topped with candied fruit — to every pastry counter in the city. In some neighbourhoods families still build elaborate altars laden with bread and food to share.
Easter
Easter is one of the great Sicilian food seasons. Bakeries fill with cassata, the ricotta-and-marzipan cake decked in candied fruit, and agnello pasquale, a lamb moulded from marzipan and pistachio. It's a rich, celebratory time to be eating in Palermo.
All Souls' and autumn
Around the Day of the Dead in early November, Palermo makes frutta martorana — marzipan sculpted and painted to look uncannily like real fruit — along with ossa dei morti, hard "bones of the dead" biscuits traditionally left for children. Autumn also brings new-season olives, almonds, prickly pears and the first citrus.
Christmas and the Immacolata
From the feast of the Immacolata on 8 December through Christmas, bakeries turn out buccellato, a ring-shaped cake stuffed with dried figs, nuts and candied fruit, and sfince appear again. The markets are at their most abundant, piled with citrus, dried fruit and seafood for the holiday table.
Summer street-food nights
Through the warm months the markets — above all the Vucciria — turn into open-air kitchens after dark, with grills smoking, stigghiola sizzling and crowds eating in the piazzas until late. It's the best season for an evening or night food tour.
Sagre and seasonal food fairs
Beyond the saints' days, western Sicily's calendar is dotted with sagre — village food fairs, each dedicated to a single ingredient, from cannoli and ricotta to bread, olives, prickly pears and wine. Many are an easy day trip from Palermo in late summer and autumn, when the harvests come in; dates vary year to year and are usually announced only a few weeks ahead, so it's worth asking locally once you arrive. Even without a festival, the markets shift constantly with the seasons: spring brings artichokes and fava beans, summer the tomatoes, aubergines and swordfish behind so many Palermo dishes, and late autumn the blood oranges and lemons the island is famous for. A food tour naturally follows this rhythm, because the guides buy from the same stalls you'll be tasting from.
Whatever the season, a tour catches the specialities of the moment. Compare your options on the tours page, or see Where to Eat in Palermo for the year-round classics.