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
