Author: John Bassett

In America you often hear, “You have only one chance to make a good first impression.” Today was my first impression of Malta. It was not particularly good.

We had to get up early this morning. That is not all that hard for me, but getting John out of bed around five in the morning is a miracle on the order of the loaves and the fishes. He somehow did it, and we packed the little Audi for our last drive in Italy. I figured that leaving Taormina would probably be easier than driving into it, and I was right about that. Plus, as six in the morning, we pretty much had the winding roads to ourselves. In less than an hour, we were at the Catania airport. Turning in the rental car was harder. The Budget office did not open until eight, and although we had been assured that there would be somebody there to pick up the keys and the paperwork we were unable to locate anybody who worked for any of the rental car firms. We could not even make it to the proper place to park Budget cars. I talked to the man running the car park. In broken Italian I explained my problem. He smiled and told me not to worry and that they would find it. I handed him the keys. 

We were relieved to be in the Air Malta line at 7:30 for our 8:30 flight. But only for a moment. Some woman from the airline came out and began to scold us and several other people in line for being late. “You must be here an hour and a half early. It is not possible to take this flight. Come back later.” We were prepared to really have a fight with her, but we noticed that the other two airline representatives seemed to continue checking people in. So, we stayed in line and we given our boarding passes.The flight was short and I do not even think they bothered to push a cart with cokes up and down the aisle. I would really complain about Air Malta, but compared to the EasyJet or Ryan Air or any of the other low-cost European carriers, they at least gave us 30 kilograms of free luggage.

We were picked up in Malta airport by some English guy. He seemed like a retiree, although as we listened to him more we both decided that he was probably younger than either of us. Like so many expats, he seemed unhappy about both where he used to live and where he lives now. He was originally from Wolverhampton. I could not blame anybody for leaving the Midlands. He complained about Malta. He said that it was way too hot. When we told him we would be cycling he rolled his eyes and said that the island has the worst drivers in the world. 

When we arrived at our hotel, I felt that immediate sense of “I have screwed up here. Big time.” We are staying not at the Dolmen Hotel but at the Dolmen Hotel Resort and Spa. It is a huge place, about the size of one of the bigger Disneyland Hotels. As we checked in, I knew immediately that this was one of the places in Europe that caters to cheap package tours. In fact, the woman was confused that I did not have a voucher, though she seemed able to pull up our reservation on the computer. As it was not yet ten in the morning, I was not surprised that our room not ready. We were told that we could wait by the pool, and she suggested that we go to the basement to chang in the spa. Although unpacking your clothes in a public bathroom make you seem vaguely homeless, I found my sandals and swim trunks and went off to the pool. This is where I descended into vacation hell.

There are two very large pools at this resort, and the expanse of cement around them is covered with hundreds of chaises longues. Just about every one of them either had a fat red body on it, or a towel, a paperback, and an ashtray. We located about the last two unclaimed chairs, and we knew immediately why this spot was open. It was right next to the activity hut at the youth pool, and this seemed to cater to kids between ten and fourteen. The played the very worst American and European pop imaginable at a volume probably audible in Tunisia. I tried to connect John’s iPad to the wireless here and managed to completely turn off the screen. I was unspeakably miserable. I decided that I absolutely hate Malta and that this is going to be the worst week of my life.

When I get into one of these moods, John tries to make best of it and do the whole “making lemonade” business. So he suggested that we leave the pool and go to beach. I was a little dubious, but nothing could be worse than Katy Perry at the swimming pool. We found our way to a little tunnel under the road that connects our resort to it’s beach.

As I suspected, it was not quite a beach. In fact, it was a slab of cement with more chaises longues by sea. Still, there was the blissful absence of Christina Aguilera and Justin Bieber, so it was infinitely so much better. Rather unaccountably for me I decided to even get in the water. It was not quite as warm as I expected, but still quite pleasant. 

We napped and swam for a bit. My mood started to improve, though I still hated Malta.

About two, we decided to have lunch at restaurant by pool. Trying to be multicultural, we both chose Maltese specialties off the menu. I had spaghetti with rabbit sauce. I had read that rabbit was an important part of the local cuisine. It was pretty bland. John had something that looks like enormous calzone stuffed with ricotta, onion, and kielbasa. It was not that good either. I guess there is a reason we have never seen a Maltese restaurant.

After lunch, we returned to the front desk and received the key cards for our room. We are on the third floor. The view is adequate, but not particularly compelling. One thing we have noticed, though, is that the room is pretty hot. We have the air-conditioning one, but it does not seem to make much difference. We finally opened the sliding doors to the balcony to see if we could get a little breeze. That cooled the room slightly, but we also hear the traffic from the street below and the Katy Perry party from the kiddie pool area. 

We figured we would go out for the evening. We thought we might like to stroll around Valletta, the capital, in the evening. Here we had another Here we had another rude surprise. We looked looked at Google Maps and discovered we were over an hour from Valletta by public transit, and over thirty minutes away by taxi. Our situation reminded me of meeting poor tourists who come to Los Angeles to see Hollywood and Santa Monica and somehow end up in a motel in Torrance.

We just decided to explore the area using the information we could glean about it from the Lonely Planet Malta guide. The area is called Saint Paul’s Bay in English though I guess Qawra is the name in Malti. It is indeed a fairly large inlet, and provides mooring for a lot of pleasure boats. There is not much of a beach anywhere, but there is a reasonably pleasant promenade around the shore. 

That is the Dolmen Hotel and Spa. As you can see, it is rather enormous. On the right side of the building is the casino.

We walked along the waterfront. We heard a number of different language spoken, but English seemed to predominate. Malta, or at least this part of Malta, seems like parts of Spain or Portugal where English tourists seem to have somehow recreated the beachside ambience of Blackpool or Yarmouth. 

But it isn’t Brighton or Scarborough. Only a block or two away from the tacky beach attractions and the shops serving fish and chips and advertising “English Breakfast Served All Day” are squat concrete blocks of flats with tiny windows. They look like pictures you see on CNN when somebody does a report from Tunis or Algiers. Fortunately, there were no burning cars anywhere in sight. 

We did come across some Maltese culture. There were some of the traditional fishing boats

with the picture to ward off the evil eye.

The area is called Saint Paul’s Bay because the Maltese believe that it was here that Saint Paul was shipwrecked and was kindly received by the local people. There are two small islands where the boat supposedly ran ashore, but these are apparently some kind of nature preserve now. But there is a monument there, and it must be important because it is under scaffolding.

The account of this incident in the Acts of the Apostles also tells how the Maltese built a bonfire so that Paul and his companions could warm up a bit. This church claims to mark that very spot. The signage on the church indicates that it was rebuilt after being destroyed by German bombs in World War II. 

It was close to eight thirty now, so we decided to return to the hotel. I snapped a picture of sunset. 

Our accommodations here in Malta are “half board” meaning that not only breakfast but dinner are included. So John and I asked at the front desk where dinner was and we were directed to a large restaurant off the lobby. It was set up as a buffet. We found a table, and took a look at what was offered. It was not particularly good. In fact, most of it was pretty awful. It seemed pretty much like the stuff they provide at casinos in Las Vegas. No, I have had better there. 

Let’s see how the bike ride goes tomorrow. Maybe I’ll like Malta a little better.

I woke up early, as I often do, but today I was rewarded for it by seeing the sun rising over the Ionian Sea and the rugged mountains of Calabria. If only that crane weren’t in the picture!

Breakfast is included with our room, as it usually is in Europe. John loves this because he can meet people from other places and talk to them. All the usual stuff was available for breakfast here, although rather oddly they were placed on a giant Lazy Susan in the middle of a large table. Omelettes and other breakfast items were also available on request. Mina, the charming young woman from Mauritius who helps run the hotel with Michele, the owner, cooks breakfast. She has a whimsical way with eggs. 

The biggest attraction in Taormina is the Roman theater. This is used for an extensive arts festival during during the summer. The annual film festival had just concluded and as we walked around the theater they were breaking down the sound equipment. We were told breathlessly by everybody that Brad Pitt and Angelia Jolie had just been there. I wondered if Miss Jolie’s famous lips had influenced Mina’s omelette design….

A young Australian tourist offered to take our picture though she seemed to think using a real camera, even a digital one, peculiarly old-fashioned. 

We went looking for the aerial cable car from Taormina to the beach. We found this little church instead. It is dedicated to Saint Pancras, or, in Italian, San Pancrazio. For most people today, Saint Pancras is just a train station in London. But in Taormina he is an important person. Born in Antioch, Pancras was supposedly sent to Sicily by the Apostle Peter himself to spread the faith in on this island. Pancras met his death in Taormina when he was stoned by opponents of the new religion. He is naturally the patron saint of Taormina and later this month there will be days of special celebrations. During that time this statue will be carried in procession around the town. Alas, we will be gone tomorrow before any of this begins. 

We still had not found the “funivia” down to the beach so we stopped in the tourist information office to ask some questions. Usually these places are staffed by cheerful young people who love to share as much as they can about their hometown with tourists. We encountered instead a remarkably sullen older woman who spoke minimal English. John wondered if they mostly operated on commission. For me, the only highlight was a great collection of traditional Sicilian puppets. Although puppet shows no longer travel from village to village in Sicily, there are many who are working to keep the tradition alive. The shows always told the stories of the brave knights who defeated the Saracens. As in commedia dell’arte, there were stock characters and plots, but each puppeteer improvised the details and dialogue of the stories. 

The king, of course, was the good guy. 

We finally found the cable car to the beach, but we also discovered at this point that John had almost no cash and I had left my wallet back in the room for safekeeping. We had enough to buy some tickets, so once we were down at the base of the cliffs we looked for a restaurant where we could put a meal on AMEX. We found the Grand Hotel Mazzaro Sea Palace. Despite the extraordinary name, this is just a big pile of rebar and cement from the early 1970’s. Fortunately, from the restaurant you do not have to look at the hotel. Instead, you have a lovely view of a small bay

and swimmers frolicking in the water. 

The food was overpriced, of course, but with a view like this I could hardly complain. 

On our way back up, we ran into a charming Italian family. It was stuffy in the car and one of the ladies pulled out a fan — “aria conditionata manuale” as she called it — and John surreptitiously pulled out his phone. 

Right outside the cable car station we found the remains of what had once been a small hotel. John and I immediately figured that this would become a movie where some girl inherits the building, restores the hotel — though the locals all think this is nuts — meets a handsome young man, and all live happily ever after on plates of beautifully photographed Italian food. 

Alas, the reality of Italy is sometimes not quite as good as the cinematic fantasy. 

Back at our one-star hotel — which we like better than the five star Grand Hotel Mazzaro Sea Palace — I took a picture of John on our balcony

and he snapped a much artier one of his view from the balcony. 

Our destination for the evening was the little town of Castelmola. Taromina is perched high up on a cliff, but when you are there you can see another small town far higher up. This is Castelmola. Michele, our host, told us we could walk there. Looking at a 1000 foot climb straight up, we opted instead to take the city bus instead for a reasonable 1,90€. Castelmola is unbelievably cute. In fact, it’s town motto translates roughly to “This is the cutest darn town in Italy.”

The cathedral there is new but we still found it interesting. It has not only deliberate Moorish elements to the architecture, but there are several six-pointed stars on it. As this was built during the Fascist period, I wondered if there was something of a political statement here. 

We took the bus back and walked through the town back to our hotel. 

This is our last day in fair Italy. We are off to Malta tomorrow. I am not sure why, but I feel remarkably at home in this country and I look forward to coming back here again. Arrivedirce, Italia! 

It was sad to say goodbye to Carmen and Angelo and our home in Trecastagni. But after a lovely breakfast by the pool it was time to pack up and head off towards Taormina. My first thought for the day had been to drive up to the Aeolian Islands and spend the afternoon there before heading towards Taormina. Once we were in Sicily, however, I discovered that I needed to at least double my estimates for travel time and that it really was not feasible to do the islands on the way to someplace else. 

John was somewhat intrigued by descriptions of the Gole Alcantara, a volcanic gorge on the north slope of Mount Etna. This seemed much more doable than my idea, so we wound our way to the motorway — always an adventure in Italy — and found the spot without much problem. 

Once we were there, however, we decided that the entire place had been oversold in the guidebooks. It is a pretty “aunt and uncle” attraction. There is a botanical garden at the top that lovingly showcases the sort of stuff that grows in abandoned lots in Southern California. 

The gorge itself is kind of interesting. It was probably formed by massive fractions in a lava flow about 8,000 years ago. The Alcantara River flows through it. I am sure that early in the season, as the snow melts off of Etna, there is quite a flow of water in the gorge and that it is as ice cold as the literature warns. But on the first day of July, it reminded me of being in a Sierra Nevada stream at the end of the summer. 

The rock formations are interesting. According to the information provided by the association that runs the park, there are different type of rock formations depending on how the lava cooled. These have fanciful names like “rosettes” and “woodpiles.” The “organ pipes” are the most prominent. 

Even I had to check out the rock formations. I promise that was all I was looking at. 

John loves to frolic in the water 

 and I like to take pictures of him doing it. 

We both admired the lovely flowing stream

and gawked at some of the tourists enjoying themselves. There was a busload of British there today when we arrived, and somehow these look like refugees from Old Blighty to me. 

It took us FOREVER to find our hotel in Taormina. We are staying at the Isoco Guest House here. It is often mentioned in guidebooks as one of the more interesting budget accommodations in this very expensive beach resort. The rooms are pretty small although each has a tiny balcony. Park of the shtick for this hotel is that all rooms are themed by artist. We were put in the Keith Haring room. 

Less appealing is the fact that the bathroom is across the hallway. It is not a shared facility. Instead, each room has its own shower and toilet. But the whole bathroom is barely larger than a phone booth — for those of you old enough to remember phone booths. 

In the evening we walked around and explored Taormina. This is Sicily’s premiere beach town. It was a favorite for many years of wealthy English and German artistic types. The town is located midway up a high cliff overlooking the straight between Sicily and the Italian mainland. There is a pleasant mix of medieval and nineteenth century architecture in the main part of town. 

John and I shared a pizza and a big salad at a restaurant. The food was not particularly memorable, but we had a panoramic view from our table of the water and the outline of Mount Etna. After dinner, we walked through town. 

John enjoyed looking in shop windows. They sell a lot of expensive pottery in the town. But the stores themselves are pretty posh, too. 

Today we went to see the great sight of eastern Sicily, Mount Etna. Europe’s most active volcano, Etna has been a magnet for visitors for centuries. Supposedly Empedocles, one of the greatest of the early Greek philosophers, fell into the volcano trying to understand the phenomenon. 

We were determined not to be so rash, but instead to follow the normal tourist routine. So we first drove to Refugio Sapienza, about halfway up the side of the mountain, where we purchased tickets for the aerial cable cars. 

This takes you most of the way to the summit. But at this point we were placed in trucks and driven up to about 3000 feet. The parade of trucks over the black volcanic gravel created a somewhat unearthly sight..

We met up with our guide after we got out of the truck. I never did catch his name, but he seemed reasonably well-informed about the geology. He spoke some English and French as well as Italian, all with a voice as gravely as the mountain itself. I suspect he probably smoked more than the volcano. 

The tourists generally followed his directions and stayed with him.

We were not allowed to go to the summit itself because it is expelling a significant amount of highly sulfurous gasses right now. So we looked at the lateral craters formed in a recent eruption. 

John came as close as they would let him get. 

I wanted to follow Empedocles and get even closer to the active crater, but the park rangers were pretty firm about not letting me do it. 

So I had to content myself with a photo of the summit. 

On our way back we looked in gift shops. It was hard to turn down buying a statue of the Virgin made out of lava and decorated with silver glitter, but I have to be aware that Air Malta is pretty strict about how much we can take with us in our luggage. 

We drove back down the mountain. John did some of the driving here. We stopped pretty often. We are getting used to our little Audi. 

The pioneer vegetation growing on the side of the mountain is quite fascinating. As this area is thickly blanketed with snow in the winter, many of the plants are alpines. 

But as we descended the mountain, the vegetation became fairly thickly forested. There were many pines, but we also noticed many of these trees. From a distance they appeared to be conifers, but looking closer we figured out that they weren’t. 

The trees have a bright yellow flower and it was enchanting to drive through miles of this maize-colored forest.

We stopped by the town of Nicolosi as we came to the base of the mountain. It looked sort of interesting, but it was two in the afternoon and during this time of “riposo” absolutely nothing was open and there was nobody on the street. So we went back to the Villa Carmen and hung out by the pool for a couple hours. 

Around six o’clock we returned to Nicolisi. It was filled with life now. Communities like this have turned into the middle and upper-middle class suburbs of Catania. They are filled with prosperous professionals and their offspring. 

Clearly winter is the big tourist season here and the streets are covered with what look like Christmas decorations. 

But they will be having a festival soon for their patron said, Abbot Anthony, and his picture was rather incongruously displayed over the Dolce Vita cafe. The saint was an extreme ascetic, and I know he would not have approved of anything other than fasting and penance. But such juxtapositions, however absurd, are in a way the essence of Italy. 

Nicolosi offers awesome views of Etna. The evening was clear 

and we really could see the smoke belching from the top of the mountain. 

 It probably was a good idea for me not to imitate Empedocles. 

John loves taking surreptitious picture of the old Italian ladies. They retreat inside as soon as they see a camera, so sometimes we pretend to take selfies and aim the camera the other way. 

Our hosts had recommended an osteria on Via Garibaldi. We had a chatty waiter who was excited to practice his English. He recommended the mixed grill for two, cooked on an old roof tile. The tile continues to cook the food and keep it warm. For 24€ it was a lot of food! 

We get pretty attached to some of our accommodations on the trip, and our farmhouse near Siracusa was no exception. As the sun came up John had to snap some picture of our room — that’s the one with the open door —

and the view from our room.

We had another lovely breakfast and packed up. We had been adopted the last two days by Tobi, the owner’s dog, and I think he was sad to see us go. Of course, as a Basset and Beagle mix, he pretty much just looks sad all the time anyhow. It goes with the genetic territory.

Unfortunately, once again we suffered from some poor planning here. My plan for today was for us to explore the extensive Greek ruins in Siracusa. It never occurred to me until I was checking the opening hours that they would close for Mondays. I suppose I have to admire the fact that the Italians are not so wedded to making money that they are willing to shutter one of their premier tourist attractions at the height of high season. 

So, instead we decided to explore the real Italy. We went to the nearby mall. John was NOT HAPPY that I had failed to pack a swim suit before we left Los Angeles. There were lots of them for sale on the street, but he did not particularly want me to walk around wearing bright green Speedos with a picture of the Tower of Pisa on the crotch. A good aesthetic call all around…. He figured that there would be some kind of Italian version of Big Five at a mall, and he was right. We found me a tasteful pair of classic red California style trunks. We also stopped at the local branch of Auchan, the French answer to Target, and picked up some groceries for quick lunches. 

We drove for a couple hours north on some pretty decent motorway. We passed Catania and headed towards the south slope of Mount Etna. Our destination for the day was the small town of Trecastagni where I had booked us at the Villa Carmen. This inexpensive bed and breakfast has perhaps the best ratings I have ever seen on Booking.com or TripAdvisor. And once we were finally there, we figured out why. Our hosts, Carmen and Angelo, greeted us warmly. This is kind of an AirBnB kind of place. They welcome a few guests into their own house, and what were once bedrooms for the kids are now accommodations for guests from around the world. It has a homey feel to it. 

And a great pool, too! After a long afternoon of driving, I was more than ready to lounge by the pool for a bit. 

In the evening, John pushed for us to go to Catania. I had not read many interesting things about Sicily’s largest city, and when we were planning our trip I deliberately skipped it. Plus, I really hate driving the narrow streets of these “centri storici” or historic centers. But, as all of you know, I can seldom say no to John. So off we went. And I’m glad we did. Catania was a pleasant surprise. 

The streets in the center are not quite as windy and narrow as most old Italian cities. And that is because Catania has been beat up a bit over the years. A massive eruption of Mount Etna in 1669 a destroyed the western part of the city, and the 1693 a earthquake destroyed what was still standing. As a result, the center is largely largely eighteenth century and features relatively straight streets. Notice how they used volcanic rock for paving the streets.  

Once again, we succumbed to being the worst kind of tourists — and we’re not particularly sorry for it. There a phony train that runs through the center of Catania and we figured that this was the best way to get a feel for the town with a limited amount of time. It took a few minutes before the train took off. One of the local canines decided that this was a good place for a nap. 

There is an obelisk celebrating Heliodorus, a Catanian who turned from the church to the dark arts. At one point, he supposedly used magic to turn himself into an elephant. I am not sure what it says to place a monument to an apostate directly across the plaza from the cathedral. 

John and I took the very back seat in the train which allowed us to photograph the traffic behind us. 

Catania does have an even more favored son than Heliodorus, the great opera composer Vincenzo Bellini. 

For some odd reason why I was trying to snap a picture of the opera house here my iPhone switched it to black and white. I sort of think the picture looks like it came from an Rossellini film. 

There is a large garden in the center of the city, and it seemed popular with “i giovanni,” the young people. 

It was soon dark and I was ready to drive back to Trecastagni. Apart from a few wrong turns, we made it reasonably fast. When we arrived, our hosts were there to greet us with a shot of homemade alloro, a bright green liqueur made of laurel leaves. 

Tomorrow we head up the volcano.

We had breakfast at our masseria underneath the tree. Our hosts presented us with some lovely bread, some cheese, marmalade, yogurt, and a hard boiled egg. The weather was perfect, and it seemed hard to tear ourselves away. But we are tourists, and tourists must tour!

Our first stop of the day was the charming town of Noto. In 1693, a massive earthquake destroyed this city and several other towns in southeast Sicily. The devastation was so complete in Noto that they local leaders decided to rebuilt the city on a new site several kilometers away. Unlike medieval Noto, a maze of narrow winding streets, the new city was laid out logically on a grid. Churches and government buildings would be on the main street and nearby would be the houses of the nobility of the area. The less prosperous were relegated to high up the hill. The late eighteenth century obsession with beautiful vistas had not yet influenced city planning. And the whole town was constructed in the most modern style of the time, what architectural historians call “Sicilian Baroque.”

The Duomo or cathedral dominates the town square, as you might expect in Italy. Like most of the buildings in this town, it is made of a handsome yellow stone. It has been recently restored so that it shines like it did on the day it was consecrated.

It took a while to build this church, and by the time they did the great age of the Sicilian Baroque had passed. The interior is basically neoclassical and frankly a little dull. A bit of the old Baroque style did remain in this side chapel now used for reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. 

Coming out of the church I admired the skyline of the town. 

We went to the city hall across the street. They were happy to show us their “Hall of Mirrors” that they use for weddings and for civic events. It is hardly the room of the same name in Versailles, but it would not be a bad place to sign a marriage license. John and I were fascinated by the possibilities of two mirrors facing each other more than the mediocre trompe l’oeil on ceiling. 

As we left city hall, John noticed a group of tourists heading into another church and decided that we should investigate it, too. This was the Chiesa di San Carlo, and it had some interesting little quirks. For one thing, there seemed to be a big obsession with what I think were griffins. Here are a couple by the main altar

and also supporting the pulpit. 

We figured out that the reason the tourists were lined up here was the for a small fee you could ascent the bell tower for panoramic views of the town. John has vertigo issues, but he insisted I go up and take some pictures. So, thanks to the iPhone panorama settings, here is Noto from on high.  

While I did the hard work of climbing up and dozens of narrow winding stairs, John went off to get gelato. He sent me a text telling me that he was across the street from the small opera house, But when I arrive at the square, I heard not belle canto but the sound of motorcycles. Apparently, it was a big Sunday meeting for the local Vespa clubs. There were at least two hundred people there, many of vintage scooters. 

Somebody gave a signal and all at once they were down the street in a suffocating cloud of exhaust and ear-splitting noise. 

We stopped in at the Noto Opera House. This is a tiny place and I think I read that it only seats about 350 people. It is named for Tina de Lorenzo, the daughter of some Milanese noble and a Neapolitan actress. The materials were not too clear on whether they were married or not. At any rate, she had a pretty impressive career at the end of the nineteenth century. I think this was one of her favored spots. 

Of course, you know where there’s a stage you’ll probably find John on it!

On our way back to the car, we stopped in at a totally forgettable museum. We went back to our farmhouse to observe the Italian custom of “riposo.”

In the evening, John convinced me we should drive into Siracusa to check out Ortigia, the old part of the town. He thought it would be a great place for an evening passegiatta. I was not excited about driving through narrow streets at night, but how can I turn John down? Our GPS, whom I have named Greta Garmin, was not always the best about picking the simplest route for us, but we finally made it. I only made one possibly disastrous mistake when I turned on a one way street just as a police car was coming out. He made some vaguely less than polite gesture, but I escaped with no ticket. We found parking by the marina. 

As we walked across the bridge into Ortigia, a woman was hawking harbor cruises. As it was not that expensive and we did not have much time, we bought tickets. We were the only passengers on what was obviously the last run of the day. 

Our skipper spoke only a little English, but my Italian was good enough to mostly follow what he was telling us. 

John admired scenery all around .

The harbor is dominated by an enormous medieval fortress. 

We asked about this enormous structure that dominates the city skyline. Our captain explained that it is the “Santuario Madonna delle Lacrime.” He said that there was a statue of Mary that once cried and the because of this the church is shaped like a giant teardrop. Apparently John Paul II dedicated this architectural monstrosity. 

After getting off the boat, we wandered around the town. Siracusa is one of the oldest settlements in Sicily, and it was one of the most important cities of “Greater Greece,” the settlement of Greek-speaking colonies around the Mediterranean in the third and second centuries before the common era. Here is the old agora. 

We came across this cart. Puppetry is a great old Sicilian tradition, and puppeteers used to go from town to town in wildly decorated carts like this. This is not an old cart, but represents the desire by modern Sicilian artists to connect with their heritage. The pictures were fanciful and some were a bit risqué.

John took this picture of two girls taking a break from their stroll. As a chubby kid turned chubby adult, I feel for the girl. 

John also loved these ladies who seemed straight out of a Fellini movie.

We had dinner at the Medusa restaurant. It is recommended in all the guidebooks. The food was decent, but not astonishing. The wifi was far better than the bread. 

As we were walking back, we came across a band concert on the steps of the Duomo. 

They were not all the great, but the audience was appreciative.

The guidebooks suggested that early morning was the best time to see the Valley of Temples. So we tried to be the first in line when the site opened in the morning — and we were! 

Despite the name, the “valley” of the temples is not a valley at all. It is a ridge. The temples were places there to make them more prominent to both the inhabitants of the city, who actually lived in the valley below, roughly where our hotel is today, and to ships sailing towards the city. There were fortifications along the ridge, and in fact some of those walls are also still standing. From gaps in them you can see how the ridge allows excellent views of the sea

and the surrounding countryside. Of course, military security rather than aesthetics were probably paramount here, but I am sure that the Greeks also enjoyed a nice vista.

.

Our first stop was the Temple of Juno. As you can see, the tourists here are not allowed to get all that close to the ruins. 

But with a good lens on the camera there is much to admire.

Our second stop was the Temple of Concord. This is the one that we can admire from our hotel pool. The enormous bronze here is modern, and probably owes more to Barbarella than it does to anything out of Greek mythology. 

This is called the Temple of Concord because nobody can figure our what deity was worshipped here. A much later peace treaty between two warring city states was found here, so the name Temple of Concord stuck. It is by far the most intact Greek structure in Italy. Many of the interior walls are still visible

along with a second row of columns in front. 

Of course, if you can see this structure from our hotel, you can also see the Villa Athena from the Temple as well. We did not have the room with the balcony. I am sure that one cost more than the GDP of some small country. 

We we left, John wanted to get his picture taken with the angel. 

There were two more temples here, but they were a walk and it was getting too hot for John. So we decided to drive to the museum before getting breakfast and leaving Agrigento. Our guide last night had told us that this was the most important archeological museum in Sicily. The museum is located at the other side of the valley on a somewhat smaller ridge. The agora and other municipal sites were here. This is the remains of a kind of amphitheater designed for political discussions rather than theatrical performances. 

There was a lot of pottery and the like inside the museum. I am sure that if you were an expert on Greek archeology the distinctions here between the styles of the pottery would have been fascinating. But neither of us have that kind of background. So we went for the most obvious and over-the-top exhibits. This is one of the monumental Atlases from the Temple of Zeus, a temple so ambitious that it was never finished.  

Here is a reconstruction of what is would have looked like had they finished it. Notice that unlike most temples, this one is closed off. The Atlases both support the weight of the roof and provide a little light into the interior. 

We returned to the hotel and had definitely our best breakfast of the trip. John wanted to remember our all white room, 

and the most luxurious bathroom of the trip as well. John is well over the “let’s go camping” time of his life. 

We had a beautiful ride to Piazza Amerina through lovely Sicilian country side. Our stop was the Roman Villa in Casale. This has the most important collection of Roman floor mosaics in the world. This seems to be a picture of the lord of the manor. Nobody, however, is completely sure who he is. There is some speculation this may have even been an imperial villa. At any rate, it was the residence of a very important Roman.

One of the interesting features here was that it had our own thermal baths. The “dominus” and his family had their own entrance to it. 

Most of the scenes in the villa involve hunting in some way. One long hallway celebrates how the Roman captured animals in Africa and transported them to Rome. This became even more disturbing when you recall that the were not being displayed there for educational and scientific purposes in a humane environment. No, they were being brought there so that they could be publicly slaughtered for the amusement of the public. I have no idea why people from Edward Gibbon to the present decry the “decline and fall of the Roman Empire.” It was a hideously brutal society and would should be happy that this nasty chapter in human history finally came to a close. 

Of course, we can see elements of our own society in theirs. Unlike the Greeks, who relegated women to domestic seclusion, Roman women had some status. They had their own athletic competitions. 

In fact, the Romans were obsessed with competition and the mosaics in the nursery celebrate this idea. A few of these are somewhat fanciful like this goose-drawn chariot. 

We saw the mosaics from elevated metal walkways about five or six feet above the floors. This meant that for visitors to take pictures they had to lean over the rails a bit. Clearly, some poor soul leaned over a bit too much and his cell phone slipped out of his hand!

We left Piazza Amerina intending to go to Ragusa, one of the loveliest of Sicily’s small cities. But as we headed towards the highway, we found ourselves dealing with a little bit of traffic!

We were both actually quite surprised by how street wise the goats were, and in no time at all they were on to their next destination. We were too … at least for a while. Sicily’s has a few high-speed, limited-access highways, but most of the secondary roads seem to have been planned by, well, goats. They meander up and down and around. I found this a bit challenging for driving, but generally charming. John unfortunately is quite prone to motion sickness and before long her became quite ill. We ended up in Gela, not at all one of Sicily’s most charming towns, sitting in the car outside a gas station while he waited for the dramamine to take effect. By the time he was feeling well enough to travel again, we needed to go straight to our lodging outside Siracusa.

We are staying in a masseria or farmhouse tonight. This is some of the most charming yet inexpensive accommodations available for travelers in Italy. We had a lovely reception from our host — who spoke no English — and we settled into our room for a quiet evening. 

We left the Palazzo Brunaccini with fond memories this morning. Today we start our drive around the island. The front desk called a taxi who drove us to the port area where we picked up car. Now one of the things we have noticed in Italy in the time we have been there is the prevalence of the “man purse” on most males between the ages of 20 and 40. I do not particularly understand the need for this, but I am old and not Italian. 

We had arranged our car rental through Expedia months ago and managed to get a car with an automatic transmission for a remarkably good price. We were given a couple choices at the Budget desk, but I said I wanted the smallest one available. My last car in Italy was a Volvo station wagon and it was a bear to navigate through narrow streets. 

Palermo traffic was awful, but after about 20 minutes were sailing along the autostrade. Of course, those first few minutes in a rental car are the most nerve-racking because you don’t know where anything is located. We first drove to Segesta, the site of an ancient Greek settlement. Located in the middle of lovely pastoral countryside, Segesta has one of the loveliest temples in Sicily and a beautiful amphitheater. 

The temple is largely intact, though the roof is gone. It is made of a local sandstone. 

Few classical sites allow tourists to wander around any more, but I think because Segesta is so far from other places, they assume that the tourists who come here know how to behave. You cannot make that assumption on the Palatine Hill in Rome. 

The theater is a marvel of design and faces out towards the sea. 

John was taken with a more modern architectural wonder, the autostrade winding through the countryside. 

We kept driving across the island for about another two and a half hours. Crossing the interior of Siciliy is not the most interesting of trips, but it is certainly better than driving up through the Central Valley of California. Our stop for the night was outside of Agrigento, the Villa Athena Hotel. Now I am a well-known cheapskate, but even I occasionally figure we ought to splurge. So as I had booked several inexpensive sites for the rest of our time in Sicily, I figured we could splurge one night. And this seemed to be the place to do it. 

Agrigento is only on the tourist trail for one reason:  it is the site of the Valley of the Temples, possibly the most important collection of classical Greek architecture outside of Athens. The Villa Athena is the only hotel located adjacent to the Valley, and from the restaurant and the pool there is a stunning view of the Temple of Concord, the most iconic image of Sicily. 

The temple changed color as afternoon turned to evening. 

We were tempted to linger for the whole evening at the pool, but a wedding reception was being held at the restaurant and the DJ decided to play American pop music at an unnecessary volume. The older people there seemed a little baffled by Bruno Mars live and other selections. For us, while it is comforting to know, as the slogan suggests, that Visa is everywhere you are, it is not so happy to discover the same about Justin Timberlake. We went to our room. 

The hotel offered us a visit to the Valley of the Temples at night when they are all illuminated. This was officially a “gift” from the hotel to its “esteemed clients”, but frankly I figured it had long ago been figured into the room price. John waited in the lobby of the hotel. Like our bedroom, it is pretty much all furnished in white. 

We did not come as close to the Temples as we thought we would. I did get this picture of the Temple of Concord, but the detail is only thanks to a good telephoto lens on the back of our camera. John chatted with a couple from Cheltenham, England. There was another English couple who no doubt were lovely people but looked like the parents in Matilda. They did not seem talkative. 

After this, they took us into the old center of Agrigento. It was a bit nicer than the guidebooks had suggested, but still nothing special. We were treated to a free gelato and then taken back to the hotel. 

Our day began with another pleasant breakfast at the hotel. I discovered that they had a decent wifi signal out here. While you may bemoan Americans bringing laptops to breakfast, all the Italians present were obsessively playing with their iPhones. 

And I had a reason to be online. Our goal for the day was to reach the town of Cefalu and I had to figure out the TrenItalia schedules and how to make it to Palermo Centrale station. Google maps gave me pretty decent directions and we made it with time to spare to catch the 11:05 train. In the past, I have been spoiled by my TrenItalia experiences taking the high speed frecciarossa trains to Lecce and Milan last summer. This was my first experience with second class on a regional train. It was not as bad as I expected, and for 5€ a ticket it was also quite a bargain! 

A little history here. Cefalù comes from the Greek word for headland. The town is indeed located at the base of a huge headland, and no doubt that is what attracted not only the Greeks but the Normans many centuries later. Wherever the Normans went, it seems like the second thing they built after a fortress was a church. The Cathedral here in Cefalù is all that remains of the Norman era. 

As Norman architecture goes, it is not one of the more impressive efforts, at least inside. The mosaic work was never finished and the rest of the decoration is a hodgepodge of Gothic, Baroque, and modern. 

Sometime in the nineteenth centuries the Italians became obsessed with these enormous silver altars. We have seen several examples. They all look like some ecclesiastical version of the America’s cup. Whores, politicians, and ugly buildings may all become respectable with age, as John Huston’s character said in Chinatown, but Victorian silver will always be ugly. 

We did not spend much time at the church, but like modern Italians we went to see Cefalù’s real attraction, the beach! You can catch glimpses of it as you reach the center. 

John was feeling a little dehydrated so we went into a restaurant for a couple bottles of acqua minerale and a quick bite. John jumped in the water while I watched the other patrons. We had two young Spaniards here who could have won the Olympic gold medal for pouting. There was a whole lot of lisping going on as these two argued!

But on to more pleasant topic. The Cefalù beach is justly famous for clear water, lovely sand, and picturesque buildings. 

But we had another stop in mind so we did not linger long. We took the train back to Palermo after a short wait at the station. Even without Il Duce, Italian trains run pretty much on time. If only Amtrak were so good!

Our final destination of the afternoon was the Palazzo Mirto. As some of you know, John adores Visconti’s The Leopard, at least in its correctly edited version. 

The Leopard is the story of the Prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat, who must adapt to the loss of his status when the southern Kingdom of Naples was forcibly incorporated into the northern Kingdom of Italy. Palazzo Mirto recalls that era. It was the home of the Prince of Mirta and his family. Here is a picture of the last prince

and of his wife. 

When the princess died around 1980 she gave the house to the government as a museum. It has been preserved more or less exactly as it was the day she passed away. The place is simply enormous and loaded with all kinds of porcelains and paintings. There was one copy of an English guide that I read as I walked through. 

We both loved the Chinese Room. 

And if the footboard weren’t a problem, I am sure that this is exactly the bed John would want at home. 

We were both taken with the interior courtyard. The fountain is made of marble adorned all kinds of shells. The frescoes on the wall have faded to perfection. 

One of the plot points in The Leopard is whether the Prince and his family will be allowed to keep a chapel at his home or whether he must attend Mass with the hoi poloi. Apparently the Prince of Mirta lost this battle and the family chapel had been converted into a puppet theater.

As we left, we visited the old stables where John struck a D. H. Lawrence inspired pose. 

This evening I’m working on getting caught up with the blog. John went out to pick up a couple sandwiches and managed to get completely lost. Fortunately, he’s back and it’s time for all of us to go to bed. We need to be alert tomorrow. We pick up the car and start driving around Sicily.

After our wonderful first day, we had a slow start to our second in Palermo. We found out that breakfast at the Palazzo Brunaccini is in a lovely courtyard.

After we finished, John snapped a few more pictures of this elegant — yet surprisingly affordable — hotel.

Our destination for the day was the old Norman stronghold of Monreale, about 10 kilometers southwest of Palermo. Even though it seems close, we had read that it was difficult to get Monreale because of Palermo traffic, so we decided to ask our hotel about the best way to get there. They told us to take a bus because a cab would be quite expensive. As it turned out, the municipal bus was cheap, but it took over almost an hour and a half for the correct one to arrive and another forty five minutes to make it to Monreale. This morning was not one of the high points of the trip so far. 

Maybe it would help to have a little history of Sicily here. The earliest settlement of the island had been by the Greeks several centuries before Christ. The Romans conquered it and incorporated it into their empire, though it remained largely a Greek-speaking area. After the military and political decline of the western Roman empire in the fifth century, Justinian incorporated the island into the Byzantine empire. However, the military might of the Arabs proved stronger than that of the Greeks, and from about 700 to about 1000 Sicily was governed by Muslim emirs. Much of the population apparently converted to Islam, and there was significant migration from north Africa and other Muslim areas. In the eleventh century, the Catholic rulers of the southern Italian kingdoms, worried about further Arab expansion, hired Normans mercenaries to attack and conquer Sicily. In 1060, six years before the Normans would invade and conquer Britain, the Norman forces captured Palermo and much of the north part of the island and established what they called the “County of Sicily.” Roger II, the man who built the Palatine chapel, became Sicily’s first Christian monarch. However, it would take several decades before Arab forces were completely routed from the island. William II, Roger’s son, decided to move the capital from Palermo to a more easily defensible position and picked the nearby village of Aghia Kiriaki which he renamed Monreale. I could see as soon as we arrived why they thought this was a better place defensively. 

Church and state hardly being separate at that time, William also decided that this should be the ecclesiastical center of Sicily as well. So William set about to build a cathedral here and to make it one of the most splendid in the world. Although the structure is a stout, squat Norman church on the outside, William hired Arab and Byzantine artists to adorn the interior. Monreale is celebrated for its mosaics. 

Probably the most charming part of this mosaic work are sequence of mosaics by the clerestory windows that illustrate the story of Noah. Here Noah and his sons bringing the animals into the ark. The pictures are charming. But there is important symbolism here as well. The ark was understood in patristic exegesis to prefigure the Church itself. As you look into the boat you can see Norman men and women there. No doubt this is how William and his court saw Sicily. It was a Christian “boat” in a hostile Muslim “sea.”

Unfortunately, our arduous bus ride and had dropped us off at the cathedral only 25 minutes before it closed for lunch, so we did not have as much time as we would have liked to immerse ourselves in the artistic wonder of this place. The cloisters of the adjacent monastery, not part of the cathedral itself now but a state archeological site, were still open so we looked around there.

 As time sometimes matters more than money, we paid of taxi 25€ to take us back to our hotel. We were just not up for another three hours with the bus. 

Sort of exhausted, we napped for most of the afternoon. In the evening we went to explore the Kalsa quarter of Palermo. During the emirate, this had been the administrative and commercial center of Arab Palermo. Until recently it had been the most rundown and dangerous neighborhood in the city. But it recently has begun to undergo a significant revival, and it is now sort of the Echo Park of Palermo. There was some effort to create a waterfront park here, but they seemed to have tried to do it on the cheap and it has a certain “urban renewal” feel to it. 

 The entertainment scene is what really is developing Kalsa. There are many good restaurants here and our hotel recommended La Cambusa. I had an amazing dish of rabbit stuffed with pistachios. I am normally adverse to what is sometimes called “food porn,” but this one merits a picture.

As we walked back to the Brunaccini we could see the just how lively this area can be now — and it was still pretty early in the evening for Sicily!