Sicily in Summer
 

As some of you know I have mostly been commuting on a boring transcon trip on UA IAD-SFO back and forth over the past year. I have tried to make some of my trip reports interesting. In reality, the trips have been very interesting for many reasons other than the travel, but after a while I have run out of scintillating comments.

So I am very excited about my first leisure trip this year of any length of time, a trip to Sicily.

My wife and I will be driving all over Sicily for about 11 days.

We are connecting through IAD-PHL-ROM-CAT (Catania). We will drive to Taormina and stay in a resort. Then we will recuperate a bit and drive around. Eventually we will end up in Palermo from where we will fly back home.

We have some accommodations planned, but others we are going to figure out when we are there. I have studied Italian quite intensively over the past few months and I am looking forward to speaking the language.

What attracts me about Sicily is:

1. the history. Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks, Arabs, Spanish, just incredible history.

2. the food. I love Italian food and Sicily supposedly has great food, range fed meat, wonderful vegetables, great cooking.

3. the remoteness. The interior especially is very remote. Many Sicilians do not even speak Italian in the interior. It is as far from my day to day work as I can reasonably get without making huge sacrifices in creature comforts.

4. the language.

I am going to take careful notes and write about the trip.

Have a great trip http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif
I'm looking forward to your trip report as I'm planning a trip to Sicily next summer.

I initially planned on going to Sicily just for a few days to visit the village where my family came from before traveling along the Amalfi coastline but the more I research Sicily I have decided that much more time is needed to see all of the sites. I didn't realize how much Sicily had to offer! I'm still in the planning stage of going to Sicily, Egypt, up along the Almafi coastline to end up eventually in northern Italy or Switzerland.

I'll look forward to your post on your trip and have a wonderful time!!!

When you're in Taromina plan on some time to visit the marrionette museum. Very interesting theater history.

I just got back from my trip which was absolutely wonderful. I will be posting a very extensive trip report over the next few days.

What's here in this Trip Report
- 7 hotels in 10 days
- incredible trip Envoy class on USAirways brand spankin new jets
- driving Italian style
- mountain top villages
- the land that time forgot
- food, fun and frolic in a most incredible island
- Roman villas, Greek temples, Sicilian goatherds
- An incredible value esp. for US folks (dollar to Euro conversion rate being so great)

This is a VERY LONG trip report and very personal so you probably won't agree with most of it but I hope you enjoy a few bits and pieces.

Why Sicily?
I've never been to Italy, let alone Sicily. People at home were surprised I wasn't going to Rome and Florence and Venice. I think I'd like to go there sometimes but not during the summer when they are too crowed.

Also, I have seen Sicily in movies and liked what I saw.

Third, it is very different from my world and I like that. It is a land that time forgot in many ways and I wanted to get away from my regular world and have an utterly different experience.

Fourth, I figured that most people would not speak English so I'd have a chance to learn some more Italian. I am a complete beginner, having studied Italian using the Pimsleur Method CDs (I was up to about lesson 40 when I left for Sicily) and some books, and I wanted to speak Italian as much as possible which I doubted was possible in Northern Italy. It turned out that knowledge of Italian was very valuable in Sicily, it would have been very hard without it.


What is good about Sicily
It is cheap (for Americans because of the favorable dollar-Euro exchange rate, and because it is CHEAP anyway0

The coffee is great (impossible to get a less than great cup of coffee - meaning Espresso

Impressive food and seafood, incredibly fresh

People aren't grasping, unpleasant or greedy

It is the land that time forgot, yet it has the civilization of a first world country

The rooms in every hotel were always clean, no matter what. Clean, tidy, sanitary. That says something, doesn't it?

Lots of history, from the Phoenicians through to the Greeks, Romans, Baroques, Countrymen lend me your ears, everyone is represented here

You can enjoy yourself by getting into that Mediterranean frame of mind

BWI-PHL (US) and shenanigans at check-in
BWI saved us about $300 per ticket so we drove the hour and fifteen minutes from Northern Virginia.

When we checked in, the USAirways agent wanted two systemwide upgrade certificates for the Envoy-class upgrade to Rome. I had called previously, months ago, and they had told me that one cert was good for one person and a companion. The wording on the back of these systemwides is ambiguous (look on yours if you got one with your preferred kit and you'll see what I mean.) They telephoned up the chain while we waited, and finally agreed to honor what the USAirways rep had told me on the phone originally. They made a note in the record so that we'd get the upgrade coming back from Rome.

As a result of this, we never got to see the BWI Envoy lounge. The first leg was in an old 737. The pilot revved up the jet into the turn onto the runway, which is unusual in my experience. The flight is very short, and when we landed we were approaching far too fast. I have never approached that fast. I thought he'd do a go-round but he landed. The pilot needed maximum reverse thrust and brakes all the way to the end of the runway. He never opened the cockpit door when we walked out. I am sure that it was a serious misjudgment.

Envoy class to ROM
At the gate, there were some gentlemen dressed in American pioneer garb. Rumor was they were providing entertainment on the flight but they weren't particularly entertaining so I never found out why they wore costumes. This was apparently the second week that this airplane had been in service, so it was a brand new gleaming Airbus 330.

The seat pitch is wonderful, a good 5 feet. The service was spectacular too. But the seats, although great, have bugs in them and are hard to adjust and several were broken. A mechanic came on board to fix my seat which he succeeded in doing. But all the way on the trip, the foot rest gradually settled on its own and I had to keep electronically raising it back.

The video units are terrific. You can pick from a variety of entertainments and you can pause, fast forward, or rewind on demand. But the controls work in a pokey manner with lots of latency and you don't have much control as you would think you have. My wife's video unit was broken so they brought her a Sony unit to use to watch movies. I watched the Green Mile, which was very entertaining although not a great movie by any means. Also, quite long, which was perfect on this 8 hour trip.

The food was very good, with a wonderful dinner, snacks, and a breakfast. There was a choice of four meals. We each had the duck, which was really good. We received quite nice amenity kits. Dessert included cheese course and fruit in addition to the sweets, and they offered us Godiva chocolates. There was a snack station you could go to at any time, and they had espresso and cappuchino.

I did peak at the First class area but I couldn't see how it looked much better than Envoy. I doubt it's worth the extra dollars, if I were flying in First I'd choose a different airline. Envoy is great, though.

We got in around 8:30 and landed perfectly smoothly into Rome.

US doesn't have a real arrivals lounge, just an agreement with a local Hilton, but we had to make our connection so we cleared customs and walked over to the Alitalia domestic terminal with our luggage and checked in there.

ROM airport customs was incredibly easy. Just a casual glance at our passport and walk down the corridor for nothing to declare and that is that. The police in the airport had submachine guns, but other than that nothing untoward. Nothing much good to eat, nothing good to shop for, but it is an airport after all.

On to Catania
What a difference. Alitalia is a bureaucratic, miserable excuse for an airline. It is overstaffed with people that could have come right out of the worst government agency with their civil service attitudes. There was an inexplicable delay, for instance, and nobody ever bothered to explain when we were going to leave or why the delay was taking place. We finally boarded a ratty disheveled MD-82 and settled into our seats that make Southwest look roomy. Fortunately the flight wasn't full so it could have been worse, and we made a safe journey over the gleaming Mediterranean and landed in Catania. They offered us a towelette in foil, horrible "pizza flavor" crackers, and some cookies that my wife said were actually good.

When we landed we deplaned through the tail door while the jets were still making noise. It was awful, the first time I've ever done that and hopefully the last.

Catania airport is basically a big baggage claim room that is hot, smelly, crowded and uncomfortable. Police are posted at the doors, keeping people from entering the baggage claim area. I had to use the bathroom but didn't want to risk leaving and not being able to reenter so I waited.

Our bags came quickly and we walked through to the little rental car window. We had reserved with Maggiore for 10 days and had paid already, but of course they insisted that there is an additional bit of insurance that was not included. We ended up paying more (even though we had paid for insurance and collision damage waivers when we had reserved the car in the US).

The rental car gentlemen locked his little office and led us through, outside, and to our car, which was a nice touch. The car was a low mileage Opel Vectra with a 1800cc engine, manual transmission, and very comfortable interior, a class F rental.

There are two "big" cities in Sicily - Palermo is the biggest, with Catania being much smaller but still much bigger than every other town in Sicily. We didn't spend much time in Catania, nor did we want to. Palermo had some charm but we didn't feel that Catania did.


Uh Oh! Or how I learned to drive Italian style

Theoretically, we only had to drive about 30 km to Taormina, our first stop, from Catania, and this should have been very easy. But there was coping with the Italian scooters, cars going around ours, people honking at us. Driving in Italy is very different. People may or may not respect traffic lights. They may drive on the sidewalk. It stressed me out because it seemed like a series of near misses and near-death experiences constantly.

And we didn't understand the signs. We missed the Autostrada entrance and spent several hours trying to figure out how to get back to where we wanted to go. What took us a few days to figure out is that in Italy, an arrow points left, say, meaning straight ahead. In the US, the arrow would point up, but they don't do things like that in Italy, so we naturally would take the left turn in this case and end up in the wrong road. And so forth.

Then on the autostradas, you drive always in the right lane except when passing. I didn't understand this until hours later it got into my dense head. Meanwhile, people whizzed by at 140km/hour, or honked incessantly at me. So what you are supposed to do is stay in the right lane and go into the left just to pass some recalcitrant vehicle. Trouble is you'll be barreling along at 140km/hour in the right lane and then almost run over some Piaggio. A Piaggio is basically a three wheeled motorcycle with a little truckbed on the back. It is really s-l-u-g-g-i-s-h and if you were to run over one you probably wouldn't know it. There are a lot of them in Sicily.

At this point, we had been awake for umpteen number of hours and we kept getting on the wrong road, circling back, ending up on roads we knew weren't right, fighting off the motorscooters that swarmed around us…

Finally we made it to Taormina, hours later, and then tried to find our hotel. We thought it was high up. Taormina is a mountain village that you access either by one narrow, narrow road, or by "tram". So we wound our way up, up, up, on the narrow road so thin that two vehicles (even Piaggios) couldn't pass without serious damage. We climbed. And climbed. And then a dead end. We were at a mountain village very high up, higher than Taormina. So we headed down again. And it was already 5:00pm local time. We had started our day in Northern Virginia and were on this maddeningly narrow dangerous mountain road. Up and down we went. Our maps were somewhere in our luggage in the trunk (great planning!). We kept asking directions and heard new Italian words. Here is a sample of the dialog:
Dove l'hotel Capotaormina, Senore?
[answer in a great swarm of unintelligible Italian]
Gratie, Senore

Then we'd proceed according to the unintelligible (to us) directions, going from one person to another like a billiard ball randomly bouncing around the pool table eventually, by chance, to land in a pocket.

And so forth. Finally, we found the hotel at the bottom of the hill, not far from the Ionian sea.

--to be continued

Re: Driving

Traffic lights are merely a suggestion http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/biggrin.gif

Capotaormia, the resort of resorts
In Hotel Capotaormina , the first floor is the top floor, approximately ground level. It is built into a cliff, working its way floor by floor down to the sea.

There are five other floors, each below the first floor. In other words, the fifth floor is five floors below the first floor. Under the "fifth" floor is a cave dynamited out of the rock. One part of this cave, which is enormous, includes "his" and "hers" bathroom and shower facilities and leads out to a seawater pool, deck, restaurant, and even the ocean herself. The other part of the cave leads to a private beach.

At about 450,000 lire per day (about $225), this was the most expensive hotel we stayed at. But oh, what a hotel! This was the only hotel to take an imprint of our credit card and to issue us a magnetic keycard also. It is very grand, with magnificent service, incredible food. We had a lunch there that is served every day buffet style (with a wood burning oven and chefs that will prepare hot food for you also if you wish) that was out of this world.

But access, that is the problem. Taormina is basically Corso Umberto, a long narrow street for pedestrians only, but it is high up and you have to get to it. You can take a 20,000 lire taxi ride, or you can drive (impractical, we left our car in the hotel parking lot the entire time), or you can walk from this hotel on a road with no sidewalk, with Piaggios and fast cars whizzing inches from you, about .7km to the tram. We chose this risky route, about a 15 minute walk that takes years off of your life in stress.

The tram ride is wonderful. It cost about 3000 lire and you get your own little car that affords a view of the beach far below, the ocean, the coastline, everything, and in 5 minutes you are up in Taormina.

Next time I go to Sicily, I may skip Taormina. It is the land of the beautiful people. Men take their best looking mistresses here. It is a shopping and eating mecca. Although it is not outrageously expensive, it is much more money than the rest of Sicily. We enjoyed Hotel Capotaormina and its caves and beach, but there is really not much of a good beach here.

Instead, I recommend you consider staying in Giardini-Naxos, a seaside community that is real, genuine, much less expensive, and has great beaches and seaside recreation and is only a stones throw from Taormina. Then you can save money and take the tram up to Taormina, but you don't need (or want) to stay in Taormina.

When you do visit Taormina, try the Baccanale restaurant (really good) or Mamma Rosa. It will set you back about 40,000 lire (Baccanale for fabulous seafood) or 15,000-30,000 lire (Mamma Rosa, depending on whether you order the pizza made in the wood burning oven or seafood or carne) with excellent service, terrific food, great attitude. Each is right off the main Corso Umberto road.

You can also buy stuff in Taormina without worrying that are being taken. We did see things a bit cheaper outside of Taormina, but not incredibly cheaper. Things like traditional Sicilian handmade puppets (albeit versions for tourists, versions that you can't use for your next puppet show but that look great in your living room and are handmade), pottery (Sicily is primarily known for its pottery), etc. It wasn't terribly expensive.

We went into some churches, had coffee at a bunch of bars, a great time had by all, but quickly boring. We were glad to come, and glad to leave for SIRICUSA.

We left and headed down south. We had the Ionian Sea on our left and the awesome shadow of Mount Etna on our right. Mount Etna is a real live volcano and you can see it all over Eastern Sicily as it is the highest mountain on the island. There are supposed to be many orange groves around it and a lot to see but we didn't go around Mt. Etna. You can see smoke coming out of it, almost a cartoon version of a big volcano. Very impressive.


Siricusa and Odysseus Ear
We drove to Siricusa, which entails driving south on the autostrada, past Catania, more south. This time I had gotten the hang of Sicilian and Italian driving and it was not nearly so stressful. We made landfall and found our hotel, the Helios.

I do not recommend this hotel. It was perched ghetto-style next to awful ugly blocks of flats, in ugly awful area of town.

In fact I do not recommend Siricusa. Siricusa (called Syracuse in English) has one attraction as far as I can see: Ortygia, a medieval island attached to Siricusa with a brief bridge. Siricusa is well known as the home of Archimedes. Ortygia was the island that created a natural harbor that made Siricusa the most famous and powerful of Western cities at one time (a time a long time ago to be sure.)

So you walk the narrow medieval streets and then you need to move on. There are a number of mountain towns in Sicily with medieval streets, and those other towns have more attraction than Siricusa (although they are not next to the water.)

Two other attractions to mention. We visited the great archeological museum downtown. It is a very…er…interesting architecture. It was practically empty. It is worth going to if you like to learn about geology and are interested in pottery shards, maps, stone- and bronze-age tools, etc., all from the area. It is close to the huge greek and roman ruins and the ticket can be used for the ruins as well.

When you approach the ruins you run into the usual clutter of souvineer stands. To your left is the roman theater ruins. Straight ahead you buy tickets and then enter the majority of the ruins. The greeks used this area to build an impressive Greek theater and as a rock quarry. You can see the marks and signs of their quarrying massive stones all along small rocky cliffs near the theater.

There is a cave called Odysseus' Ear that you don't want to miss. It was quarried out of the rock and was used variously as a prison. A Japanese-speaking tour operator sang a familiar sounding song but with Japanese lyrics. The sound carried most impressively throughout this cave, and everyone clapped at the end. The acoustics are very unusual. Outside next to the impressive theater is an ancient road and other ruins that are worth seeing.

The rest of Siricusa is nothing much at all, aside from a temple to Apollo ruins downtown. We had nothing to do at night, a surly hotel staff, and no restaurants, just the ugly bad Siricusa. After seeing the sights we were glad to move on.

Fantastic report!!--can't wait to hear the rest http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

richard- great report. I look forward to the next installment. On second thought, just tell me tonight at dinner! See you later. Cheers.

Thanks, Geo and Mauld...Geo, looking forward to dinner...coincidentally I was at the Ernst&Young bldg this morning and noticed the McCormick & Schmitt there so now I know where it is http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

Piazza Armerina
We drove on into the interior, to Piazza Armerina. On the way we enjoyed the stark, empty countryside. You could go for many kilometers without seeing a soul. The countryside resembles Southern California without the irrigation. It is hilly and mountainous, not many trees or shrubs. You will pass an abandoned stone farmhouse quite often. It is as though everyone got up and left one day, leaving everything behind.

There are occasional orchards of almond trees, olive trees, and lemon trees, and some vineyards here and there. But you often don't see a soul anywhere around in any direction.

Occasionally, we'd pass through a tiny village built on a mountain. These small villages of perhaps 2000 - 10,000 people are timeless, they could be out of the 17th century aside from the cars.

Inhabitants gaze at you in a bleak, tired way. You often need to go through these villages but it is uncomfortable as it seems like there is little real economy, little life there, mostly desultory destitution.

There are usually no hotels in these villages. The towns such as Coltagirone, on the other hand, have a genuine life to them and you don't feel uncomfortable the way you do in these smaller villages that time forgot.

Piazza Armerina is a charming medieval town with a real life to it. We stayed at the Palace Hotel Paradise. We hadn't booked anything but had no trouble finding the hotel (many signs throughout the town point to it) and no trouble getting a wonderful room.
There is a lot of construction going on there. I asked where l'ascensore was, but it turned out there wasn't one, it wasn't finished. No trouble, the porter brought our luggage up the the room.

The rooms are very nice, with a balcony and view of a little valley. Wonderful tiling and painstaking detail you see a lot there.

The hotel has great pool, bars, restaurant (didn't eat there though). The shower didn't have a curtain nor a lip so water flowed all over the bathroom when we showered, but the floors are all carefully and beautifully tiled (they were this way all over Sicily) so it didn't matter much.

The real attraction here is Ville Imperiale, about 15 minutes outside of town. You can drive there, but but we found it very confusing to find Villa Imperiale so we paid a driver to get us there.

Villa Imperiale is a large house that belonged to the co-emperor of Rome. There are baths, toilets, bedrooms, and most impressive it's all covered with these amazing mosaics depicting Rome. A hallway 150 meters long is covered with mosaics about hunting and capturing beasts in Africa. Another has girls in what look like bikinis doing athletics. It is an incredible site because of how well preserved it is. You walk through the whole thing and get the feel for what it was like to be a ruler of Rome.

There aren't many restaurant choices in this town, except for pizzerias (which are good) and several tavola caldas which roast chickens on spits and offer pizza all done in wood fired ovens (forna a legna, look for the signs that say this).

You can get a decent meal for 10,000 lire or so but only after 8:00 in the evening. Any other dining there was not. We reluctantly left our wonderful hotel and headed towards Coltagirone.


Caltagirone
Caltagirone is famous for its centuries and centuries of pottery tradition. You won't find day-to-day dining china here or anywhere in Sicily (this is high tech stuff, dishwasher/microwave safe, and made in Switzerland or Japan or other places, but not in Sicily).

But you will find incredible Sicilian tiles and pottery for decoration. Caltagirone is an upbeat, pleasant mountain town well worth visiting. There is an old medieval part on the hill, and down below is the rest of the town.

There are only a few places to stay. We stayed at Hotel Monteverde, a small hotel which was very pleasant, in the lower part of the town.

Mamma does the cooking, with the two sons and one daughter and the father doing all the rest of the work. We had no trouble getting a room without a reservation. They were very intent on our having dinner there, so we agreed, and we are glad we did. The dinner was wonderful, and the whole thing including our room and dinner was only 140,000 lire.

I would have liked to spend more time here but we had to leave the interior and go to Agrigento. There are two ways to get to Agrigento from Coltagirone. You can stay in the interior and go to Caltanisetta and then head South from there to the coast, or you can go South right away and take the coast west to Agrigento.

We choose the interior route because we have heard the coast isn't that pleasant (a lot of the view is ruined by the occasional ugly oil refinery or industrial plant that couldn't be more offensive looking if they tried) and because we loved the interior so much. Distances driving can be deceiving. It was perhaps 70 kilometers but it took about 4 hours.

On the way we saw a lonely bronzed Sicilian goatherd alone with a small herd of goats, with bells around their necks, and other sights, but we barely saw other souls on this entire drive.


Ahh! Ahhh-grigento!! So much to see here
Agrigento is an ancient town that moved very early from the lowlands to the hilltop, in a defensive measure designed to make the town harder to conquer. There may or may not be a lot to see in Agrigento, but it is a great destination anyhow.

As soon as we hit Agrigento we headed for the Valle dei Templi, where there are many magnificent Greek ruins and an early Christian burial ground.

There is only one hotel here, and we stayed there (without a reservation, got the best room in the house - 205 is best, or 206 if you can't get 205, but every room is great here) at the Villa Athena. From our room with its high ceilings, four poster bed, and magnificent balconies, we faced the magnificent Temple Concordia, a fully intact Greek temple.

Below is an ancient peach tree grove, and to the right is a temple to Heracles, to the left a temple to Hera. At night they light up these temples. It is an unbelievable sight and awe inspiring.

All along the kilometer or two on the line these three temples make are other sights - burial catacombs for very early Christians, a huge sacrificial alter, and much more, all overlooking the Mediterranean.

It was fascinating to watch people come up to the temple and then descend down the road, much as they might have in olden times.

We spent the day looking at these ruins and had dinner at the hotel. Dinner was magnificent. Including veal, fish, wine, and a great Sicilian dessert, it cost 120,000 lire. The hotel was expensive by Sicilian standards but cheap by ours at 260,000 lire. We very reluctantly left and headed towards Erice, but next time I'd spend more time here. I just loved it.

Love the reports. Keep 'em coming.

Great stuff, Richard! Brings back a lot of memories from when I lived in Southern Italy (San Vito dei Normanni). Driving definitely took some getting used to. Especially when you would find yourself on a narrow senso unico that dead-ended into a stairwell.

I miss the food and the markets, but not the stench of billions of olives ripening in the sun!

cheers,

'toad