Thoughts on Sicily

Our last week in Sicily has been fun with beautiful warm sunny weather.

Sicily is a microcosm of all that Italy has to offer in a compact island in the shape of an equilateral triangle with sides about 200km long. It has the Roman and Greek and much older ruins. It has the weather. It has the lovely food and wine. The interior reminds us of Central Otago with its browns and rock strewn countryside. And it has Italian drivers, the only thing we will be glad to get rid off. They drive like a dog on drugs. Inconsiderate, pushy, impatient and taking huge risks with their overtaking and pulling out of side streets. If a parking place is too small on the side of a road, they will just park in it at 45 degrees and not care about the traffic snarlup it causes. They may have good technical skills but they are the most unsafe drivers in the world. I imagine that driver training covers only the mechanics of driving and not like most other countries concentrating on road safety and consideration to other road users. They totally ignore ALL road signs and just drive as if they are the only car on the road.

Then there is the rubbish. Not for Sicilians the concept of home collection. Each town has one or two big bins that you carry your rubbish too. They are collected too infrequently and consequently they are always full with rubbish bags strewn all around the bins, ravaged by dogs and blowing in the wind.

Still the island has a soul and the music of its charms will reverberate in us for many years to come. If you haven’t been to Sicily then we strongly recommend it.

But back to this week. On Monday we drove to the big port of Trapani about 100km away in order to visit the mountain town of Erice. We were hoping to go up by cable car but that had closed for the season, so we drove up the tortuous windy road and wandered around the car free streets.

On a clear day (which it wasn’t) you can see Cap Bon in Tunisia. On the way back we called into Segesta to see another perfectly preserved Greek Temple. It was never completed for some reason but it is in almost new condition.

On Wednesday we went into Palermo which we were not as impressed with as we thought we would be. Narrow streets with bombed out buildings still there from WWII. The markets were smaller than we thought but still very colourful. Palermo is surrounded by mountains with a lovely sheltered bay.

We wandered from side street to side street  and having thought we may feel insecure were pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of the people. The Teatro Massima is a magnificent but modern building, that hosts the lovely Opera that Palermo is famous for.

And the Piazza Pretoria had lovely fountains with beautiful statues surrounding it.

There are lovely churches galore, a lovely cathedral but we gave our main attention to a Monastery on the outskirts of Palermo where in the 1800s, the dead were embalmed and dressed in their finery and placed on the walls of the catacombs below the monastery.

They look quite grotesque in the dim light. There were hundreds of bodies, divided into sections depending on the age, profession and nobility.

  For the rest of the time we have been relaxing in our villa and enjoying the wonderful view over the countryside and sea.

We are 200m up a hillside which is almost vertical below us.

This is the last entry in the blog for 2009. Tomorrow we are setting off for Rome, driving along the coast road by the Tyrrhenian Sea to Salerno before cutting inland on the A1 to Rome, where we board our flight on Tuesday for Hong Kong transit and then Auckland. It has been a year of great contrasts starting off in Holland, then the battlefields of Northern France and then the Neckar valley and the Main valley to the Danube before hitting the great Rhine Gorge and our trip back to Holland. Then by car to Provence, the Amalfi Coast and now of course Sicily.

It has been a pleasure having you follow our adventure.

Ciao from Wendy and David

And so to Palermo

We have had a week of super weather and showers. Luckily we have managed to see everything we have wanted to so on the two days it wasn't as good we enjoyed relaxing in the villa.

On Monday we drove South into the Monte Iblei, a barren range of mountains about 80km away and visited Noto, reputed to be the most baroque city in Italy, which is to say the World. After a lovely lunch, we drove in the misty rain to see Pantalica, Sicily's greatest ancient necropolis. Here deep in a remote gorge there are several thousand tombs hollowed out of the valley sides.

It goes back 3500 years. In fact much of Sicily is actually Greek in origin, it having been a Grek colony rivalling the city state of Athens for thousands of years before the Romans eventually took over the place about 200BC.

Next day we visited lovely Syracuse which was surprisingly empty of tourists which made it a lot better experience than other places we have visited. It was the home of Archimedes and has history oozing from every street and house. We stopped at the fish market and bought some lovely mackerel which we BBQ'd that evening on the terrace. They were superb! Then we wandered up to the main Piazza where the Duomo is.

It a lovely old church based around an old Greek temple. Then onto the Fountain of Arethusa, a freshwater spring right on the edge of the sea and in large part the reason for the settlement of Syracuse. The ancient Greeks held that the nymph Arethusa rose here after swimming across from the Peloponnese.

The oracle at Delphi foretold the founding of the city by referring to a natural spring beside the sea.

Then off to the Archeological Park to see the Greek Theatre built over 2500 years ago and still used today for plays. It can house 15000 people.

There are many other impressive ruins and structures in the area and we spend an enjoyable hour or two exploring them before going onto the Church of St Giovanni which has been destroyed twice by earthquakes and remains as a ruin. But deep beneath lies a secret. The most extensive network of catacombs in the world outside of Rome. We were escorted around by our guide and saw the altar where St Paul and St Peter preached on their visits, as the church goes back some 2000 years. Syracuse is a gem of a city. You can feel the history of the place in every building, every vista - a sort of subconscious layer overlaying the sights and sounds of the city.

On Wednesday we left bright and early and headed up the hill and up and up towards Mt Etna. It is about 3350m high and at 2000m we parked the car and caught a cable car up another 700m, and then got into a unimog and drove another 300m up to the site of the craters of the 2002 eruption, about 3000m high. That is as far as one can go as the main crater (As you can see in the photo) is still smoking from a number of vents. The 2002 craters are still very hot.

 

The 2002 Craters

It cost 52 euros each but was a great experience to see the the barren landscape of only 7 years ago.

By the time we got back to the bottom of the cable car the cloud had set in and we had cloudy weather until Saturday when we left Pozzillo for Palermo. The villa here is very picturesque as you can see from the view from the terrace.

On Thursday night the heavens opened and we had torrential rain and it wasn't until the next morning we found out that the rain had caused many deaths and  lot of destruction in Messina just 60km away. Pozzillo is built on old lava flows from Etna so the water just runs down into aquifers.  This is the view from our terrace of the lava rocks and a fishing boat leaving the small harbour.

Messina  backs onto the Monte Nebrodi mountains and the water can only flow down streams.

We left on Saturday for our next villa in Carini near Palermo. We went via Agrigento on the South Coast, to see what is the probably the greatest ancient site in all Sicily - The Valley of the Temples.  Actually it's not a valley as it is on a ridge but from the valley you can see a line of temples along the ridge remarkably well preserved.

The Temple of Concordia is reputed to be the best preserved temple outside of the Parthenon in Athens.

We also saw the ruins of the greatest Greek temple built anywhere in the world. Then on to Palermo and through it to our lovely villa on the top of a mountain overlooking the Gulf of Carini. The GPS found it OK but we weren't sure which house it was so we had to knock on a few doors to find out. Apparently we were the first people ever to find our own way to the villa. Thankyou Garmin!

Today we went to see the great cathedral of Monreale on the outskirts of Palermo. There is no picture as it is impossible to photograph its glory. With its ton of gold leaf and stupendous mosaics covering the walls, it is one of the great wonders of the world. It was built in just 10 years in 1070 and looks as good today as it ever did.

This week we shall explore Palermo and surrounding towns. More next week. Ciao.