A Big Trip to Italy Part 1: Sicily
In September we went to Italy for a week. We flew into Palermo, then took a coach ride across Sicily to Syracuse. After a trip up Mount Etna, we took the Intercity Notte train overnight to Milan complete with a ferry ride for both us and the train. We followed this with four nights in Milan, complete with a trip to the Leonardo da Vinci experience.
Excitingly, we also travelled with our neighbour and sometime quizmaster Brian. He’s the other handsome devil in all these photos!
Back in January 2017 we went to Italy for a weekend, which I wrote about on the blog as a little trip to Italy. This, by comparison, was a big trip to Italy. So big in fact it requires multiple posts, this is the first of three.
Palermo ↑
We flew out to Palermo, which is one of the more interesting plane landings I’ve experienced.
The plane landing.
Sicily is an island that reminds you of its unusual topography as you come in on its westernmost point, with some beautiful rock formations. Less interesting was the really long queue at immigration. We took the train from Palermo Airport, which took about 50 minutes to get to the central station. We found our accommodation with no trouble. It was a nice high-ceilinged apartment quite close to the station, accessible by the kind of lift you see in movies.
We walked into the centre of Palermo and tried to get ourselves oriented. We had some lunch and then went off to find a rather majestic looking fountain. Although in the heat the fountains were trickling at a rather slow pace. I think it was about 28C the day we landed. We soon took refuge again from said heat and had a cup of tea and a cake.
We trekked around Palermo some more and encountered a rather graffiti-strewn area. As Ingrid posed for her picture,
Not pictured, the teenagers setting off bangers and having a laugh.
nearby teenagers were letting off firecrackers in the attempt to intimidate us, but we just laughed. This was very much the non-touristy side of Palermo as discovered by people who had been up since two thirty that morning. We figured out where we wanted to eat that evening and promptly headed back to the apartment for a nana-nap.
That evening was a gluten-free pizza place. Not being a very good nana-napper, I was so tired I could barely finish my pizza. I definitely didn’t have room for dessert, which almost never happens. Next morning we went out for breakfast. Ingrid had disappointing quinoa and undercooked poached eggs. I had a very mediocre granola - the fruit was melon and a single bitter blackberry. You couldn’t fault the location though, it was the Palermo “four corner” with little fountains and statues dedicated to the four seasons, four Spanish kings, and the patron saints of the aforementioned four seasons. The cafe is great for people-watching, but don’t eat there!
We took an alternative route back to the accommodation, we checked out a little side street with lots of shops and workshops with people selling all sorts of gear, mostly in support of the restaurant trade or working on cars, bikes and electric scooters. It was one of those little side-quest walks that gets you a better feel for the place.
From our home base we walked to the bus station to find out where our bus to Syracuse was going from the next day. Then we went through the station and past the ferry port for a look at more of Palermo. By this point, I was completely disoriented and had no idea where we were going, but eventually we found the botanical gardens. There were very nice Banyan trees. They are wonderful trees that are a sort of colony tree: they send down multiple shoots and so one tree can look like a whole forest of independent trees, but they’re actually all one tree. We also saw the Italian tree of the year 2022: that was not a banyan but a Moreton Bay fig tree. They do look quite similar though. In fact, after seeing these ones, I started to notice them all over Palermo. I could have stayed in that botanical garden probably the whole day (even the bins were photogenic)
Photogenic bins are a specialty of mine. Probably.
but Brian and Ingrid were keen to get on.
We walked down to the sea front and looked out at the coast. We saw some cargo ships off in the distance and the port that they’d either left or would eventually make their way into. The joy of being on holiday is that you can stare out at the horizon like that and wonder about such things. Walking along, it was obviously shoulder season, quite quiet for what is probably a hive of activity at the height of summer. We found a posh-looking seafood restaurant that seemed to be frequented by locals. I’m not a big fan of seafood so I had pasta alla Norma:
Your humble correspondent, much enjoying a local delicacy.
a Sicilian delicacy of tomato sauce and aubergines. It was very tasty, high praise from someone not that keen on aubergine.
We walked along the coast and back into Palermo towards the port, with the intention of heading back to the accommodation a different way to previously. This let us see a hidden side of the city, walking through drought-parched parks one alleyway over from a tourist drag of restaurants. More random fireworks. On the way back to the accommodation we saw another collection of local shops, this time lots of linens and clothes and IT. After a nap, we went out for dinner at a coeliac-friendly restaurant with everything gluten-free being prepared in a separate kitchen. Walking home we stopped into a sex shop, it was quite eye-opening, though most devices for sale in there would open up more than just your eyes! We also dipped into Lidl for croissants to eat on the bus the next morning.
To Syracuse ↑
On Sunday morning we left Palermo behind,
Leaving our accommodation in Palermo behind meant closing this big wooden door one last time.
taking a coach across Sicily to Syracuse. It takes about three and a half hours. At about 15€ each it’s great value. We snaked out of Palermo, seemingly stuck behind other suburban buses. But once you get out of the city, the views are incredible. The undulating countryside reminded me of travelling in South America.
About an hour in we were on an elevated road that felt like riding on a long bridge across the landscape. The entire road was on stanchions and at the moment both lanes are one road, but part way through the journey we saw that they are currently building another road lower down. It seems that eventually there will be two lanes in each direction. The new sections were progressing towards each other in the middle from the outside in. You see the work in progress at different stages, so you get a rundown from above of the elevated road as it is being built.
We stopped for a ten-minute pee break in the middle. I’m glad I took advantage of this. We pulled up at a random service station and the driver said to everyone “right we meet back here in ten minutes” and gestured the start of the timer on his phone. We all wandered back after ten minutes. The driver did a headcount and after the international sign language for everybody’s here, we were on our way again.
After the pit stop it was time for tunnels, these were really cool, although some were recently built and didn’t have any lights in. Once we were through those, my mind started to play tricks on me. Looking up at the steep-sided hills, it looked at one moment as if there were a town up there with houses carved into the rock, the next moment it was gone, just rocks. Some sort of bizarre illusion. Or maybe I was micro-napping!
Suddenly we had arrived in Syracuse and went looking for our accommodation. The bus station and the area around it seemed pretty ordinary, a truth of all bus stations everywhere I guess. It was a humid day and grey clouds glowered down on us as we trundled through the streets with our suitcases. Lots of dog poo to dodge and lots of cobbles that we couldn’t. After checking out the Airbnb, we went for a walk. One of the first things we found was a rainbow, one that persisted as we headed for the beach. We took lots of photos of that and went down to the sea. We found a restaurant that we wanted to have dinner at and then wandered on. We found the road over to Ortigia, the little island attached to Syracuse that we were planning on visiting the next day. Then walked back and we got into the restaurant, sensing that there was rain imminent, we sat indoors. Ingrid and I had lovely Brazilian beef steaks. We had a very nice bottle of wine between us which might have been more expensive than the one we ordered because I think the waiter did something wrong with the wine - he was pretty green. We staggered home and slept well.
Ortigia ↑
We went to Ortigia the next day. We started out at the temple of Apollo and then walked through the thronging markets - the first part was what I call the “Chinese Cargo Crate dump” with all the usual tat piled high while the stall owners work out whether to try and get your attention or to shrink back in embarrassment. More fun was when it emerged into an actual practical food market with traders shouting at the top of their voices. That guy really wanted me to buy a fish but I still had fond memories of my pasta alla norma.
Ortigia is a little island joined to Syracuse by bridges. There are very few actual roads, everything else is about the width of an alleyway and frequented mostly by pedestrians and the odd nutter on an electric scooter. It’s very quaint and the sort of place where you just forget yourself for a while and sigh happily. We zig-zagged down to the southernmost point (via a small lunch stop) but the castle was closed. We did have a little chat with some film students who were making a movie in the castle grounds. Inspired by them I decided to shoot a video on my phone using the cinematic mode for about the third time ever.
We doubled back, upwards, taking in the SIRAMUSE museum with its interactive exhibitions about several important people from the history of Syracuse: Archimedes, Saint Lucy, Plato, a chap famous for free-diving… then we wandered through the various museums and exhibits attached to the cathedral. We learned what a monstrance is. Then we visited the actual cathedral, an intriguing structure adapted from a Greek temple. You wouldn’t know this too much from the inside but when you walk past the outside because you’ve managed to get lost while looking for where you want to eat dinner it’s pretty blooming obvious.
We eventually found the restaurant and had a lovely dinner. We were introduced to the owner’s cats. One was called ‘Itler, on account of his quite prominent cat-moustache, rather than any particular desire to invade Poland or anything like that. By the time we headed back to the Airbnb, it was dark. I think when I realised how small the island was, I would not have expected to stay there until after dark. Compared to the rest of Syracuse, you could see it as the main attraction.
Mount Etna ↑
For our last full day in Syracuse, we took a tour of Mount Etna. We were picked up in Syracuse by Federico in his minibus and we got to know our co-trekkers, two people from LA. Our first stop was a lava tube - these are caused by lava flows from the erupting volcano cooling as they move down the mountain, the outside cools while the interior continues to move. This creates hollows that you can explore hundreds of years later while wearing a hard hat on holiday. I don’t think I’d ever have decided to go explore a lava tube, but I’m glad I did.
As we continued up the side of Etna, Federico continued to explain about the vents and successive eruptions and the recent activity. As he drove, he pointed out the effects of past eruptions and the kinds of tree that grow up in the years afterwards. At the top, we parked up and put on our jackets and jumpers as it was noticeably cooler now. We went to the loo and then had a coffee (a tea for Ingrid naturally) before heading out on to the mountain. We went for a nice walk up and down the different ridges and hollows. And when I say up and down, it was very up and down. The variety of mosses and flowers that appear in the years after an eruption were explained to us. There was a cable car submerged in lava because of a previous flow. The new one had been built next door. The different sizes of ejected rock that get blasted out of the vents during an eruption were explained and shown to us.
Mists rolled in. The landscape was truly alien. But humans still swarmed everywhere, little groups like ours roved the paths from crater to crater, from ridge to ridge. Plant life spread out across the slopes like mould spores in circular blobs. In one direction you could look down the mountain but the view faded into the mist. In the other direction, only mist.
Returning to the minibus and another loo stop, the rain began to come down full pelt. As we descended in the minibus to the winery for our next stop - a five-flight wine-tasting and lunch
Life’s always a bit better after a drop or five of wine eh Ingrid?
- the rain continued to pour causing floods across the roads that our driver had to navigate very carefully. The wines were very nice though I was grateful that we were given plenty of food to soak it up. We liked the first one best - unusually for us it was a white wine - and we bought a bottle. We waddled back to the minibus and I think all of us (passengers at least) drifted in and out of consciousness on the way back to Syracuse. That evening we napped, rising only to buy some bread at the local store in order to be able to eat something that night.
Catacombs ↑
Checking out of the Airbnb by 10, we plopped our luggage into the lockers near the station and headed up towards the amphitheatre. We saw the modern cathedral, posed for some selfies but then kept on walking. It was one of those hot days where the sun stings you and you feel like you are melting. It was probably quite tame compared to most of mainland Europe this summer, probably about 32C. Anyway, we ended up at the San Giovanni catacombs instead of the amphitheatre, and going underground seemed like the cooler option. These date back to the early period of Christianity’s establishment in the region, between 300-500 CE.
After a rather gratuitous VR intro that would probably have been better as a video, we were ushered as a huge group down into the catacombs. It was an interesting tour but it wasn’t always easy to hear what our guide was saying because there were so many other people. Above ground it was scorching hot with blue skies and white stone walls, down below it was frescos and gloomy tombs, but it was at least a bit cooler. The complex is truly massive but without the freedom to wander, you only really got this impression from the guide pointing at the map (if you were lucky enough to be close to the guide when she explained this).
When our tour was done, we went and found some lunch for Ingrid. Once again we used her app to navigate to an establishment proudly displaying the international gluten-free symbol. I was surprised by how ordinary and workaday the place was. Brian and I picked up our lunch at a deli closer to the station, getting these sort of pasty things wrapped up in foil to have on the train.
In the next post, I’ll tell you how that little pasty tasted and all about the train trip to Milan!