Viva la Sicilia! part 1

Ok, everyone, brace yourselves….this is going to be a long post. This is primarily for myself, however…I’m using the blog to preserve my memories, so if you aren’t interested in intense detail about my trip, be prepared for some skimming. I am also attempting to paragraph better (I was informed by someone *ahem*Eric*ahem* that my paragraphing leaves something to be desired) so let me know how I do.

I pulled into Palermo on an Alitalia flight on Friday night. After reading in my guidebook on the way down that “Women should avoid walking around alone at night in Sicily, specifically Palermo” I was really stoked to walk by myself at night to my hotel. I bussed to the train station then found my (really, really sketchy) hotel by myself. I considered starving and not eating dinner, but around 8:30 I decided to suck it up and find some food. Sitting down to a dish (I had ordered something that was pasta and “spada,” which means “sword”…so I was slightly nervous about what I was eating, but it turned out to be swordfish) my mom called, so it was like I got to have dinner with her. Nice.

The following morning, I got up and showered before striking out onto the streets of Palermo. I did some of the typical sites, San Giovanni degli Erimiti has these lovey red domes and amazing cloisters, I checked out the cathedral and the crypt and treasure there (and witnessed a wedding…it was SO bizarre, though, NO one was paying attention at all, including the couple getting married…seriously, everyone was just talking as if the priest wasn’t saying anything at all). I spotted a great pastry shop and enjoyed a cream filled croissant before going in to the Cappella Palatina in the palazzo. This was actually really stunning, a cross of Norman, Byzentine, and Arab art, all done in these fabulous mosaics. I was really impressed with this, and I was also really impressed with myself when I went on a guided tour of the palazzo in Italian and understood it all. I hung out in the Piazza Vittorio Emmanuale (all swaying palm trees under this fantastic sun…amazing) and then napped before hopping on a bus to meet Eric at the airport. I was REALLY excited to see him! His plane was right on time, and I spotted his Blogger sweatshirt right away =) We headed back to the (sketchy) hotel and he sacked out, I read for awhile.

We got up on Sunday morning and found a good place for breakfast. For those of you who don’t know, breakfast in Italy is sadly lacking. There is coffee, of course (faaaabulous, you can’t get better) but they generally just eat a pastry of some type along with that. For a breakfast fiend like myself, this a serious problem. However, I’ve been coping so far. So E and I got a cappuccino (he drank coffee the WHOLE TRIP, it was phenomenal. I feel like I’ve accomplished something serious) and a apricot filled croissant. Then we wandered off to find Avis and rented our cute little 2005 Golf. Driving in the city was certainly an adventure, but we peaced out of Palermo pretty quickly and set out towards Segesta, a great site south of Palermo with an amazing Doric temple. This was my first temple since Greece 2 years ago, so I was really excited. Eric was stoked too. It was really great to be with him and get re-invigorated about Italy. I’m so used to seeing lovely views and quaint balconies over narrow streets…hearing him exclaim over things that have become common in my life really has brought new appreciation to my experience here (so thanks, Eric!) We walked to the Greek theatre also on the site at Segesta (it was hooot but there was a great view) and then set off to Erice, a tiny medieval town perched on a cliff over the west coast of Sicily. Eric and I were charmed immediately. There are some minor sites in Erice, a nice duomo and a neat castello, but we were basically just enjoying small town Sicilian life. We had a great lunch of pesto trapponese and pasta alla norma (a Sicilian dish, pasta with eggplant, red sauce, and cheese) and then found a hotel (randomly, a one star paradise…just our style). We wandered the town and shared a cannolo from the café bragged as owned by Sicily’s foremost pastry chef, and enjoyed a macchiato (yep, Eric’s first). We walked down by the castello at night, which was beautiful, then relaxed a bit and I enjoyed reading all of his ENGLISH reading material. After another walk around for a gelato, we sacked out.

Monday, we had a breakfast at our hotel then headed out to Selinute, a major site for some Greek temples! Our guidebook suggested a detour to Cava di Cusa, the place where all of the stone for the temples at Selinute came from. I wasn’t expecting a whole lot, but this actually turned out to be amazing. We could see several columns that had been carved out of the rock but were not yet extracted…and they were HUGE. I was totally shocked and all the more excited to get out to see the temples. In Selinute, we had fun wandering among the intact temples (very impressive) but I had even more fun climbing on the ruins of the temples that didn’t make it. I just like climbing on rocks, but these were EXCITING rocks, so I had even more fun. Eric had determined that a trip to Corleone, the site of the GODFATHER, was absolutely pertinent, so we set off inland and north to Corleone. When we finally got there, there was this interesting rock that sort of jetted up out of the city, so we walked around that and got some juice at a bar (and made friends with the bartender, he was really nice). It was a pleasant little town and we hung out for an hour or so before heading south to Agrigento (after returning home, I told my host mother that we went to Corleone and she was shocked…apparently this place is really dangerous. None of our guidebooks warned us for THAT! But we made it out ok.) Agrigento by night is a nightmare, for anyone who cares. Do NOT try to navigate this city. All the roads are one way, and not going your way, either. After about a half hour (or more) of unsuccessfully finding our hotel, we gave up and stopped at the first hotel we found (Hotel Pirandello, which was fun because I’m reading some Pirandello in school). Then we headed into the centro to get some dinner, which was terrible again. The man at the restaurant was SCARY…we got our cannoli for the evening (we promised each other we’d eat one every day!) after being ignored for quite some time by the shopkeepers in favor of a family, the father and son were sporting matching mullets (uuugh). Eric and I quickly agreed to avoid staying in a big city again at all costs. Deal!

Tuesday morning we had breakfast in our hotel (it was uninspiring, to say the least) and then got VERY EXPLICIT instructions from the guy at the front desk as to how to get to the Valley of the Temples (we were NOT about to drive around aimlessly like the night before). We parked the car in the car park and started out around the site, but I think we were both pretty unimpressed, we got involved in a conversation about Halloween costumes. I was actually pretty bummed about the whole thing, it just looked like a bunch of lame rubble to me, when I examined one of the little info stands. The only (slightly) interesting thing to see in this part of the site was this huge statue of a man, which Eric described to me saying, “Oh yeah, I read about this in my book…there were like, 8 of them and they did something but then…whatever.” Incredibly informative. It turns out they were actually 8 meters tall, and there was a picture on the board of a reconstruction of the temple. This huge statue of a man, 8 meters tall, was actually one of mannnnny holding up the temple – but the fantastic part was that this was maybe, MAYBE a quarter or a fifth of the height of the whole temple. Surveying the grounds, I realized the WHOLE area I was in, all of the pointless rubble, was part of what was one a fantastically huge temple to Jupiter. It was, in fact, the biggest temple in the Greek world. Suddenly the whole thing didn’t seem so lame. I loved this moment of recognition, though. The size of the temple was so far beyond my own small human understanding that I couldn’t even really understand how fantastic it was…when it finally sunk in what surrounded me I was completely dumbfounded. After explaining it to Eric, we both had a lot more respect and excitement for what we were seeing. On the other side of the park, there were 3 pretty interesting temples, the Temple of Hercules, the Temple of Concord (the most intact Greek temple remaining, I’m pretty sure) and the Temple of Juno. We then walked up to the museum and wandered around there too, some pretty cool stuff. We jetted out of Agrigento with a short pit stop at a grocery store for some necessary food purchases (mmm Nutella) and headed up to a Roman villa which had some pretty amazing mosaics. The mosaics had been under piles of mud for like 700 years, which actually turned out to be a good thing, because it allowed the preservation of the mosaics. They were pretty fantastic. We called a hotel in our guidebook in the small town of Noto and set off…the man on the phone gave me instructions on how to find the hotel, but when we actually got there we could NOT find the place. It was terrible. Finally, Eric realized that the number in the guidebook was wrong and we were looking for the wrong signs! The place turned out to be fantastic – we had our own little private terrace in a reconstructed farmhouse. The man who owned the hotel was really sweet. Then…we set out on a mission of the impossible…to find a restaurant open on Ognissanti, All Saint’s day, a holiday here in Italia. On the drive back down from the villa we had seen the celebrants, tons of people out in cemeteries saying hi to their saints…it actually seems like a lovely holiday to me, to gather the family round and go out to visit the cemetery. Unfortunately, it’s not really feasible in the States, where people move around so much…but it still seems like such a lovely holiday to me. So anyway…Eric and I searched all around Noto, and were extremely pleased to find a nice-looking restaurant open. And thus began the accidental 15-course dinner. Yikes…but it was an experience…and we had a lot of good conversation and a LOT of laughter during those 15 courses.

more to come!