02/07/2026
APPEAL FOR ALAB PALERMO: LET'S NOT LET AN AUTHENTIC PART OF THE HISTORIC CENTER GO DARK
These days Palermo is going through a story that deserves attention, careful consideration, and honest discussion.
The Guardia di Finanza has ordered the administrative seizure of 17 workshops belonging to the ALAB network – Associazione Liberi Artisti Artigiani Balarm – over alleged administrative and tax irregularities. The association has announced it will appeal and maintains its status as a nonprofit association, stating that it has operated as an incubator for new artisanal and creative businesses.
I won't go into the merits of the investigation, which is for the competent authorities to carry out with the utmost rigor and transparency.
For those who work in tourism and in showcasing local territories, this story raises a question that goes beyond the individual case:
What kind of city do we want for the future?
In recent years, ALAB has helped reopen shuttered storefronts, bringing life back to streets in the historic center that risked being abandoned. It has built a network of workshops, artists, artisans, designers, photographers, and young creatives who chose to invest in their own city instead of leaving.
Anyone who guides travelers through Palermo knows that the city's real value doesn't lie only in its monuments or restaurants. It lies in living workshops, in places where something is created, told, and passed down as identity.
A historic center made up solely of pubs, B&Bs, and businesses designed for quick tourist consumption can generate immediate revenue, but over time it loses soul, residents, and authenticity. This is precisely the mechanism that fuels overtourism: neighborhoods turned into stage sets, less and less inhabited, less and less recognizable. The result is plain to see: cities that end up offering the same experience everywhere, with rows of eateries serving hurried meals, photocopy menus translated into five languages, often mediocre-quality products, and an offering designed to satisfy the largest possible number of customers rather than to tell the story of a place's identity. When workshops, artisans, ateliers, bookshops, and businesses rooted in the local territory disappear, we lose more than pieces of the local economy: we lose memory, character, and the very soul of our cities.
Experiences like ALAB represent a different model of city: a diffuse micro-economy that generates jobs, social and cultural presence, the recovery of abandoned spaces, opportunities for young artisans, and an authentic tourism offering capable of setting Palermo apart from any other destination.
Behind these workshops are young women and men who chose to stay. They decided to resist bureaucracy, precarity, and the — often understandable — temptation to move elsewhere or to set aside their talent for a job that's safer and more profitable, but also less creative and less capable of leaving a mark.
There are women who are, all at once, artists, entrepreneurs, mothers, and professionals. I think, for example, of my friend Rosselli and her artisan bookbinding .
Walking into her workshop is an experience that engages every sense. There are the colors of Palermo's historic markets, the reclaimed fabrics that cover handmade planners, notebooks, and albums. There are bookmarks and objects that hold the living memory of Sicilian culture — worlds away from the stereotyped, identity-less folklore of coppola-and-lupara fridge magnets that fill so many souvenir shops just a few dozen meters away.
In her workshop there is taste, research, and passion. And then there's a paper-cutting machine, which might seem like a simple work tool, but stop and watch it for a moment and you understand how it can become an instrument of discovery: children experimenting with their hands, adults understanding how a book is made, the smell of the paper, the sound of the pages, the colors, the materials. It's a place where you don't just buy an object: you live an experience, meet a person, and take home a story.
And this is exactly what more and more travelers are looking for. Not a city built to sell something, but a city capable of telling its own story through the people who inhabit it and keep it alive every day.
Palermo has a thousand-year history, but its most precious heritage isn't only its monuments. It's the people who keep giving it a soul.
That's why a city without residents loses its own identity. And a tourist city without artisans, workshops, bookshops, and outposts of living culture doesn't just lose appeal: it loses its future.
Defending places like ALAB means defending the idea of an authentic, inhabited, creative Palermo. A city that doesn't want to become just like every other, but wants to keep standing out for its ability to create beauty, relationships, and culture.
So I want to make an invitation: let's get informed. Let's read the different positions, let's understand the regulatory questions — but let's not reduce this story to a simple administrative news item.
Behind those seals are young people who pay rent, who have invested time, creativity, and hope. There are workshops that have contributed to the urban decorum of Palermo's historic center, making streets safer and more lived-in that had stood empty for years.
Supporting ALAB doesn't mean asking for exemptions from the rules. It means asking that a solution be found that upholds the law without erasing a heritage of creativity and urban regeneration built over more than fifteen years of work.
Palermo needs more living workshops, not more lowered shutters.
Anyone who loves this city — residents, tourism professionals, travelers, and institutions — should pay close attention to what's happening.
Because the future of our historic centers is decided this way too: by choosing whether to defend the networks that produce identity, culture, and community.
