Sicily Travels

#13 Arrivederchi Italy – We’re Alberta Bound

We are in the final day of our 30 days in Italy and are relaxing poolside rather than walking 10,000 steps.

The southern sun has warmed. We’ve driven for miles and miles around villages and farmland, walked through steep hillside towns climbing to their centres  and grandiose cathedrals.

Strolled through gardens and orchards with even M, a non-gardener, trying to help me identify sweetly scented blossoms. 

  And we’ve dined morning, noon and late at night.  (A 7:30 dinner reservation is early, most restaurants don’t get guests until 9 pm.) We even discovered what Italians do when all the shops close from 12:30 til 4:30 – they go home and cook big meals and rest, before restarting their work day late afternoon. 

    Though we planned this day to be chill  before our return to Alberta’s late spring we don’t sit still. We wander through a museum created from a restoration of La Posta Vecchia, a grand home first built on a then already ancient site in 1640! Destroyed in a fire in 1919 it evidently sat ignored until purchased and restored by the famous magnate J. Paul Getty in 1960 with the guidance of the archaeological societies of Etruria. But then, presto(!) – artifacts of all kinds, including finely crafted mosaic floors were discovered under the basement dating to the … hang on … first and second century AD!!

Trying to get our heads around that we took a beach walk along the shores of the Mediterranean. I had to pause and consider the history of what we’d just seen – trying to feel the spirits from 2000 years ago!

It makes me want to cry and be happy at the same time. Being close to works of art so ancient makes me think we have to get the most out of our time here on earth, create art,  put down our iPhones, lol, love the ones we’re with,  and be present for each other. It’s what we have.

As we watched the fishermen  on the rocky ledge I couldn’t stop considering how I might make life at home  more Italian.

I’ve decided I need to build a stone wall, install huge (maybe ancient – 1st century) terracotta planters, shine a light up my apple tree, plant a lemon tree (ha!), drink all my future cappuccinos from a pretty pink china cup, eat more bread and gelato and somehow be thin, wear pungent floral perfume and gaze at it all through popular crazy-huge black rimmed glasses. Prego. Prego. We’re soon to be Alberta bound. 

#7 – Oops! Back to Sicily – The Post About Dining!

M and I are on a long holiday to see how much we can eat! … I mean to celebrate his retirement. We’re in the boot of Italy but so much bread, olives, pasta, sausage, calamari, pizza and gelato has gone to my head and I’ve left out this post penned in Sicily.

Back on Sicily we left the Baroque city of Noto, and traveled toward Catalina pausing in Syracuse, the birthplace of Archimedes and home of Pythagoras and Plato, to walk the seawall above the Ionian Sea  and lunch at an outdoor cafe. Beside us a chic and thin Sicilian couple ordered a big plate of crispy  calamari, just as we did. Full of the fat rings of fried squid, we were ready to pay and continue exploring but noted that the Sicilians were  now indulging in big plates of tomatoe and olive covered rigatoni, and you bet they’d finish with gelato and/or cannoli. Observing so many Sicilians dine that excessively I was desperate to know the secret of binging like the bourgeoisie and still mirroring skinny models. Behind us an American told his server the portion was too large to finish. The waiter declared rather emphatically, “This is Sicily. We only have big portions. Enjoy it.”

When M and I weren’t discussing how locals packed away so much fine Italian grub and remained fit, we were back to being blown away by their driving. They flew past us on rough stone roads, with garden walls boxing us in, maneuvering the blind corners with moterbikes overtaking us all. M exclaimed and I gasped and gripped the door handle, convinced the Sicilian drivers had some sixth sense combined with a strong faith in the afterlife. 

Drivers and diners aside,  what I’d like to bottle and bring home is the the delightful transcendent scent that filled the air when we arrived at the country inn we were booked into, situated in an orchard of lemon and orange trees. The afternoon that we’d heard there was a spring snow storm back home in Canada M and I competed for the best lemon tree photograph. I got into bed that night intoxicated not by wine or eperol, but that sweet aroma of lemon blossoms.

# 9 Damn! That Volcano Is Errupting!

We had an odd experience on our Sicilian travels – M and I were in our lovely hotel room hearing perhaps  thunder – there was an incredibly loud ‘huffing’ outside.  I opened the door and gasped (lots of gasping on this trip). “Mama Mia!” (Okay, my exclamation was in English and more explicit). “M get out here!” I cried. “There are  (another bad word) flames coming out of that volcano!” We rushed to the reception to find out if we needed to scurry for our lives. A hotel employee told us Mount Etna suddenly erupts with flames many times  a year, but agreed that it was frightening, before going back to casually serving drinks. Be still again, my Canadian heart. 

Mount Etna

By morning the flames had stopped and (more scariness)  we drove up, up, up to view the rich black lava rocks high on Mount Etna (with a zillion tourists), hiking over red and black lava rocks. Some believe the volcano is the gateway to the underworld, others credit it for making the hills down to the sea a Mecca of fertility. 

M’s Italian barber back home insisted we must visit the town of Taromina – we wound our way there next, more narrow roads, speedy drivers, ridiculously steep climbs with switchbacks – so more freaking gasps. (Of course). 

   M swears it hasn’t been intentional but we’ve saved loads of Euros by always being in the villages from 12:30 to 4 pm when shops are locked up. But nothing closes in the tourist meca of Taromina. With enough lemon printed linen I focus on the perfect Italian leather hand bag, explaining to M how it’s too well priced to NOT  buy it. Prego. Time to wind back down away from the volcano – a few chunks of lava rock in my new bag. 

Below Mount Etna

# 8 The Godfather

It was the big tour day!  And it was fantastico. To recap: M and I are on holiday in Italy. Our route through Sicily has been created with the suggestions of a wonderful travel agency in Canada aptly called “Quench” but we are driving on our own, except for two scheduled tours. 

We were again steadily changing elevation, this time in our tour guide, Vitorio’s car, rising high above the sea on switchbacks. M and my kids are huge movie buffs, and a favorite film is The Godfather. Vittorio was driving us to Savoca, the tiny mountaintop village where Michael Corleone hid in exile and where he met and married the beautiful Appolonia. Savoca is at the top of a perilous peak approachable only by a goat path road that winds around like a child’s mindless scribble. Vittorio, a local, drove always with one hand while gesturing to us with the other; this so even as he remarked at a passing truck “woo-a, that was a close”. And he nevertheless expressed amazement at Coppola choosing to shoot in that remote, hard to reach village recalling the antiquated cargo and cameras from that age of film.

The view of the sea far below was stunning, as was the revelation that we were being invited to order drinks and granita, (a Sicilian iced dessert), in Bar Vitelli, the actual bar where Coppola filmed Michael convincing the father of Appolonia, that his intentions were honorable. 

Vittorio told us the villagers were the extras, including his grandmother, during that thrilling time in Savoca 53 years ago. Myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about our movie aficionados back home and how I’d love to show them this curious exotic world we’d time-travelled into. Honestly, so many in my family can recite The Godfather from Vito Corleone’s first, “Why did you go to the police? Why didn’t you come to me first? To Michael’s final “Don’t ask me about my business, Kay.”

 Next Vittorio drove us even higher up some more goat paths (ineptly translating to English for us, he mistakenly called them “roads”) which were made of glassy volcanic stone, to the church Michael and Appolonia were wed. He showed us the now tattered robe, hanging (unprotected) on the church wall, that the preist in the movie wore. The priest’s red prayer book, also a prop in the actual movie (presumably rather valuable for this reason alone) lay on a chair like a discarded pamphlet for us to pick up and leaf through.

It was difficult to believe there was civilization any further up the mountain, but Vittorio drove us still higher yet. Our ultimate, even more precarious, destination felt like a village out of a Dr. Suess story, the breeze circling up over our heads in a place close to heaven while the beach and bars beckoned far, far below. M was already texting our kids his photos and exchanging famous Mario Puzo lines.

This tour had all the intensity of “going to the mattresses” coupled with a perfectly reasonable apprehension of “sleeping with the fishes.”