Palermo

Where am I?

Mosaics in Cappella Palantina

Name the capital city of Sicily. Yes, it’s Palermo. How did you know? And it is a beautifully situated capital city too, strung around a handsome horse-shoe harbour, with steep attractive mountainsides behind. The city centre divides into the centro storico and the attractive 19^th century streets that sprang up after Garibaldi rode into town and liberated everyone. It has two theatres, nice shopping streets, lots of characterful little trattatorias, a big cathedral, remnants of Norman city walls, and Sicily’s parliament. It also has THE most amazing collection of mosaics this side of Ravenna – some say that Palermo’s mosaics rival the famous ones of Ravenna. I’ll need to go to Ravenna to check this claim, I can see that.

Cappella Palantina: a riot of medieval colour

Sicily's Parliament Chamber

Marcella the guide is a local Palermo girl, and knew how to zero in on the best of the mosaics around town. The “must see” ones are in the Cappella Palatina, where you can also visit the (ex) Royal Apartments and the assembly room of the Sicilian government; and in Monreale, a separate town about 20 minutes drive up the hillside behind Palermo. In Monreale there is a magnificent cathedral and a Benedictine Abbey with a lovely cloister. The Monreale Cathedral was built by a Norman ruler of Sicily named William II, specifically to outshine the Cappella Palatina, which was built by his grandfather Roger II (Ruggerio II).

The cloister at Monreale

Monreale mosaics telling the Testament stories

Monreale. The Christ's hands are 7 metres apart.

Poolside at the Villa Igiea, Palermo

Villa Igiea. View from the room.

But you are sick of churches and monuments and ruins, you say? Then let’s go back to the divine Villa Igiea, which was originally built as a summer home for one of Sicily’s richest families (best not to ask), especially for one of the daughters of the family who was consumptive. The building later became a sanatorium, and is very pleasantly situated in lovely gardens on the bay. The decor is Art Deco and the rooms have tall windows that you can throw open to the sea breezes. On Easter Sunday there was live piano music, a special Easter Lunch menu, sunshine, and dining al fresco. Then there was the pool. Palermo’s climate is sub-tropical – the bougainvillea, hibiscus and frangipani were just beginning to flower. Was there something more you wanted?

Easter dolce

Easter Sunday Lunch

This completes my travel-related raves about Italy and Sicily – at least until I go back. Which seems inevitable.

Misteri di Trapani

Good Friday, Trapani, Sicily

One of the statues...very sad scenes.

It is a little late to wish you Buona Pasqua, but better late than never. I spent Good Friday this year in the towns of Trapani and Marsala in Western Sicily. All over southern Italy, towns large and small hold processions through the streets, usually bearing a life-sized figure of Christ in one of the stages of his Easter passion (the processions have Spanish origins and similar procession occur there too). It is community occasion, but also a funeral procession, and a deeply serious thing for the people. In Sicily, they do dark and tragic very well, and nowhere is this more evident than in their Good Friday processions. In Trapani, they have been doing their “Procession of the Mysteries” – Misteri di Trapani – since at least 1612.

Another band.

Trapani’s is a particularly famous procession, which lasts for 24 hours. Yes, you read right – from 2 pm on Holy Friday until 2 pm on Easter Saturday. Much as I knew you would want a full report of this event, I regret that I wasn’t up to staying for the whole 24 hours. I did arrive early enough in the proceedings to snag a position relatively close to the front of the crowd lining the barriers around a very small square in front of one of Old Trapani’s many churches, the Church of the Purgatorio. This is where the Easter statues spend the year, before they come forth for their annual airing, atop platforms decorated with fresh flowers, candles, ribbons and lace, and carried by teams of men. We in the crowd waited patiently while the local dignitaries assembled, the mayor donned his red, white and green sash, the head bishop arrived in his hot pink outfit, various ecclesiastical persons fluttered about in white frocks, and the local TV cameras waited on scaffolds. Eventually the bishop made a speech, a band formed up, and we had kick-off. The band wailed out a funeral dirge, like something out of ‘The Godfather’, various versions of which were to echo around the streets of Old Trapani for the next 24 hours.

Acolytes.

I watched, quite transfixed, as the first of the statues emerged from the church porch, inched over to one of the ecclesiastical gents, paused for a blessing, then slowly processed off down a side street. Each statue was not only carried by a large entourage of men, but was also accompanied by its own 40 or 50 piece band, a bevy of strange religious acolytes (children in red Klu Klux Klan hoods, young girls carrying sheathes of roses, little children with golden wings, serious boys with candles on poles), and – importantly – representatives of various town guilds carrying the banners and insignia of their Guild. It is said that the statues were granted in trust, by deeds, by the Brotherhood of St. Michael the Archangel, which instituted the rite in the late 16th century, to the members of the local Guilds in exchange for the promise to carry them during the passion procession every Good Friday. And a promise made is a promise kept, in Sicily.

Most impressive of all were the men carrying the statues. Each wore a suitably solemn expression, most were in suits and ties, or the uniforms of their guilds. There were young men and old men, all with a bowed-down stance and a long 24 hours ahead.

A serious business.

I watched for about an hour and a half, and saw five or six of the statues emerge. For each one, a new group of acolytes assembled, and a new band appeared (where all these people were marshalled remains a wonder). I was thinking that it might be time to move on, that perhaps most of the statues had now emerged, when a conversation in the crowd around me revealed that there are in fact twenty of them. Twenty! By my reckoning, it would take about six hours for them all to emerge and join the procession. I retired for a well-earned gelato.

'The littlest musician.'

A closer inspection...

It is always difficult to see much from amongst a crowd, but I certainly got a good dose of atmosphere, if no very good photos. The dirge-like band music haunts me still. But by good fortune (rather than good management) I had that morning happened upon another of Trapani’s churches, Sant’Agostino, a 14^th century church of the Knights Templar (the only building left in Sicily that is associated with the order). It was badly bombed in WWII, but on this particular Good Friday its claim to fame was that it housed an exhibition of the very wood, straw and canvas statues that are carried in the Easter parade. I was thus able to inspect some of these rather crude but uncannily life-like figures up close. They are traditionally made of light materials so that they are not too heavy to be carried all day.

There are some wonderful photographs of the Misteri di Trapani on this site.

Marsala's two statues, on the advertising poster.

A sorrowful sight.

Later in the day, I found myself on the sidewalks of Old Marsala, having successfully negotiated the parking question again (aren’t cars a pest when you want to leave them?) Here the locals didn’t try to compete with their close neighbour’s famous parade on the question of quantity. They went for quality. The parade here was just reaching the main street at about 4 pm (it too goes on for hours). Various members of various congregations were marching in matching purple (“if there’s purple, someone dies”, as we learnt a couple of blog posts ago); there were some dirge-like intonations and readings over a tinny loudspeaker, one band (only one!)...and two statues. I didn’t notice the dead Christ at first, because he was carried lying down. All attention was on the Madonna – carried high, and with her own purple velvet canopy carried aloft behind her.

And what Madonna she was! The artist had created an epitome of agony. All along the street, as she was carried past, grown men had tears in their eyes, everyone bent their heads and crossed themselves piously, an old lady watching from her balcony wept openly. I was a little aghast. The Madonna had a silver sword piercing her heart! Made the hairs stand up on the nape of my neck, I must say. Very Sicilian – the agony and hardship of all those centuries of oppression transmogrified into their religious observance.

Sad spectator, Marsala.

I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get any dinner in Marsala that evening. Everyone was so sad and lachrymose. But in the end, Marsala came through, with the fresh fish I by now demanded. Hopefully everyone would cheer up on Easter Sunday.

The Itinerario for the Trapani parade...24 hours

Here is quite a long clip of the parade in Trapani, very well filmed. Listen to a little to get the flavour of the dirge and the seriousness, and the involvement of the whole community in this centuries-old ritual.

Tuna

Bonagia, Sicily

Tonnare de Bonagia: the buildings around the tower.

I didn’t actually appreciate that in Western Sicily I’d be staying in an old tuna fishery - but I told you Sicily was surprising. In a small (very small) place near Trapani, named Bonagia, there was once a traditional tuna fishing village called a tonnare. There used to be tonnares all along the coast here, where fishing families lived clustered around the sheds for processing tuna, rooms where the families lived, and of course a small chapel, making and mending nets and baskets. The tonnare in Bonagia has been turned into a hotel, with the buildings centred around a paved courtyard. The dining room and bar now occupy what was the tuna processing building. You sleep where the villagers used to live, and the chapel is still there. Outside the arched entrance with big old doors is...the sea. And the boats, and the current crop of local fishermen, who live in regular houses now, along the crescent of the small bay with its tangily-perfumed fringe of dried seaweed.

tuna with goat's cheese

Until not very long ago (and maybe still, though I didn’t hear anyone admit it) the tuna was fished here in the traditional manner, called the mattanza. The tuna were ‘herded’ between the mainland and a close-lying island, into a fixed net system, surrounded by the boats, and killed with spears and hauled out of the water by the brute strength of the fishermen alone. The sea became very bloody and the killing frenzy looks rather terrible (there is a gory wall painting in the breakfast room at the Tonnare de Bonagia). But in fact it is said to be a very selective method of fishing, resulting in sustainable stocks. Stories are told in Bonagia today of individual tuna weighing in at 700 kilos in the past, but now they reach only (a still respectable) 400 kilos. Dire mutterings are heard about the Japanese fishermen nabbing the best tuna on its migration from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean.

The tonnare is a nice place to stay, and the walls breathe a lot of history. The choice of what to have for dinner is also fairly clearly taken care of: tonno (tuna), of course. You might like to read about The Last Tonnara.

Canoli and coffee "Before"

If Trapani and its district are known for tuna, Marsala is known for...you guessed it, marsala. Large swathes of Western Sicily are covered in grape vines, where they’re not covered in olive trees, and the wine produced is gorgeously light and quaffable. The story of marsala, once the king of aperitifs in the 19^th century, is rather patchy. Over-production and lack of attention to quality in the early twentieth century saw it relegated to cooking wine. But – and I knew you’d want me to check – I can report that the quality is back up where it should be, and this is a delicious aperitif style wine which goes excellently with Sicilian sweets. Nowhere near as sweet as a ‘sticky’ dessert wine. You can drink it with your 11 am canoli!

Canoli and marsala "After"

Ancient windmill. The green way.

Out on the roads between Trapani and Marsala is another ancient crop: salt. In the great salt pans of this area, salt is garnered from the sea by the age old method of evaporation. Sea water is let into large ‘pans’, becoming ever-shallower as the salinity increases, until once a year the natural sea salt is left, to be gathered (back-breakingly under the summer sun) and left to dry for six months under terracotta tiles. The pumping and grinding operations are powered by windmills – well, today there is some help from electricity, but you can see windmills silhouetted across the landscape. Originally they used nothing but wind power and an Archimedes’ Screw [see blog post on Siracusa!]. The salt was, and could still be, gathered with no modern fuel at all.

The salt pans of Nubia, near Trapani.

Erice: very nice once they let you in.

Bonagia, Marsala and Trapani are coastal towns – Trapani actually boasts a respectable sandy beach. But high on a beetling ridge behind them sits a tiny medieval town called Erice. It is said to have been settled by the Phoenicians around the 8^th century BC, and to have housed the castles and garrisons of just about every occupier of Sicily ever since. But today the tourists have a bit more trouble getting in – operating in front of a bevy of ‘BENVENUTI A ERICE!’ signs is a ferocious lady parking officer, who will NOT let you park in a completely empty parking lot, on a holiday weekend, with car-sized painted parking spots, even if you buy a ticket. According to the uniformed señora, this is a parking lot for autobus only. So *** off.

Still, if you do manage to find a parking spot – it has to be on the edge of town, because Erice itself is a maze of narrow, cobbled streets, some barely wide enough for two people to walk – you will be delighted with the town. It has a rather lovely (reconstructed) Royal Church with beginnings going back to the 11^th century. It has nuns in a cloister who bake and sell almond pastries. It has friendly locals who make great granita and will sell you some marsala. It has tiny pedestrian byways where you can walk completely alone (except for whoever is behind those ajar shutters up there). It has a castle and legends galore and views in all directions. There’s the Tonnare de Bonagia down by the sea, recognisable by its square Norman tower. Time to go home and eat more fish. Almond pastries and marsala for dessert.

Convent-made pastries

They have it all in Erice.

View from Erice to Bonagia and San Vito lo Capo
(that impressive cape in the distance). 

Vulcano!

The Aeolian Islands

The dreaded hydrofoil

If you drive to a place called Milazzo on the north-eastern coast of Sicily, they will let you park your car for the grand sum of four Euro per day. Right by the docks. Moreover, it may even still be there when you come back. Then you can take the hydrofoil (an ugly, uncomfortable but fast way to travel) to the Aeolian Islands, those specks of mystery and myth somewhere out in the Tyrrhenian Sea, formed by volcanic activity, and still being formed by volcanic activity. But here’s a word of warning: just because the ticket office sells you a ticket to the island named Vulcano, and you show your ticket when you board the hydrofoil, and the timetable says it is going to Vulcano, this may not necessarily be so. Indeed, like me, you may end up with an unscheduled stop on a completely different Aeolian Island, and you may not even realise this until you are standing rather bereftly on the dock with your suitcase, watching the hydrofoil speed off, wondering where your hotel shuttle is. You may forlornly ask a passing old lady which island you are on, and she may reply ‘Lipari’.

Lipari. Not impressed.

Ah, Lipari. The largest (although not large) island in the group, which you may have wished to visit sometime during your stay, but for which you now conceive an unreasonable dislike. The old lady offers you accommodation in her house in rive al mare, but all you want is a boat. And possibly someone to blame. The old lady says this happens all the time. The guy in the ticket office, who receives the full force of your customer complaint, says this happens all the time. When, after an hour, the next boat takes you on the ten minute journey to neighbouring Vulcano (so close you could probably have waded, if it hadn’t been for the suitcase), the shuttle driver says this happens all the time. The people at the hotel reception say this happens all the time. Everyone shrugs their shoulders. Why doesn’t the boat service announce the arrival destination? You ask. Calmly and reasonably (hah!) Everyone shrugs their shoulders.

Vulcano. The right island.

But wiping the despised Lipari from your mind, you look around, and discover why everyone has been telling you that you are very lucky to be coming to Vulcano. A tiny island with a two-horse town of shacks and fishing boats, black lava sand beaches, a divine resort indistinguishable from Paradise, and a great smouldering volcano. What more could you desire (other than an efficient boat transfer service)? Fresh fish every day? Check. Hot sulphur pools you can swim in? Check. Glorious sunsets over the sea every night? Check. Cocktails to go with the sunsets? Check.

Fish for dinner? No problem.

Pesce fresco!

You can wander down to the town, or take the shuttle. Or, since the resort only opened for the season the day before and there are about two guests so far, just ask and the shuttle guy will take you anywhere. The whole island is only 21 square kilometres. In town, you can make friends at the local fish place (‘Da Vincenzo’) and choose from whatever was caught that day, plus local veggies in season, fava beans and artichokes. And excellent Sicilian wine – even a little more than you might otherwise imbibe, since the hire car has been abandoned to its fate on the mainland.

Vulcanologist. Pleased with self.

Watch out for the locals

Ah, and then the volcano! The Romans named the island Vulcano and contributed the word we now use for volcanoes. They believed the island was the chimney to the god Vulcan’s workshop. Vulcano’s own volcano is known as the Gran Cratere (although there are several others as well, including the smaller Vulcanello). Its height is 380 m, and it takes about an hour to walk up the well-formed path, dodging a few goats and a lady who wants you to pay 3 Euro for the privilege. The volcano is one of four active non-submarine volcanoes in Italy, but it hasn’t erupted seriously since 1888-1890.

Views to die for.

Oops - wrong path down.

The walk is a fine one and the views from the top quite amazing – both down into the sulphurous, steaming crater, and across towards Lipari and the other islands. If you climb on for a further half an hour you can reach the highest point and a magnificent 360 degree view. Almost all the Aeolian Islands can be identified from up here, if the misty distances give you a break: Lipari immediately below you, Panarea to the east, and the active Stromboli just visible beyond it; then the two smaller islands of Filicudi and Alicudi to the west (they that enhance your sunset). And you could kid yourself that you can see Salina but really it’s behind Lipari; and little Basiluzzo out near Stromboli really can’t be made out. Once you’ve swooned over the view, you climb back down around the volcano crater, and if you’re not careful you will find yourself taking a different path down through what turns out to be some pretty active fumaroles spewing rather disgusting sulphur gas and almost taking out a group of lost French tourists. Picking your way gingerly over the yellow rock, you will probably decide that swimming in the sulphurous pools in town (“throw out your bathing suit afterwards”) can probably be skipped; although it is fascinating to see some hot springs actually bubbling up in the ocean just off the beach.

Back to work.

Location, location, location.

Sundowner.

Vulcano was originally called Therassia (by the Ancient Greeks; it means ‘source of heat’), and whoever built the delightful resort of the same name knew how to choose a location. 'Therasia' sits on the end of a small island joined by an isthmus to Vulcano proper, and Lipari is right across the channel. The infinity-edge pool, cactus gardens, pictures windows, cool terraces, and possibly the most magnificent sunsets on the face of the earth are nicely complimented by some very friendly staff, in their first week of the season. The sunsets – ah, let me tell you more about the sunsets. As well as the usual magic of a sunset over the sea (forgive my raptures – I’m from Sydney and a sunset over the sea is impossible there), on Vulcano you only notice the two small islands emerge from the mist when the red ball of the sun drops slowly behind them, silhouetting their pyramid volcano cones against the red of the setting sun. Add a gin and tonic and anticipation of a fresh fish dinner, and I think you’ll understand why I was reluctant to leave Vulcano. Very reluctant.

Oh, and the car was still there when I got back to Milazzo.

Sicily

Taormina

Regular blog readers may have noticed a slight hiatus in my up-until-now pretty excellent daily blog update record. This has of course been due to spending the last two weeks luxuriating in my wonderful holiday in wonderful Sicily. But now I’m ready to tell you more about this amazing island. Somewhere I read that the best description of Sicily is that it is constantly surprising, and this was certainly true for me. Food, scenery, people, traditions, food, stories, beaches, mountains, history, food...

Sicily - the red bit.

Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean. It is an autonomous region of Italy, and has been since unification in the 1860s – Garibaldi rode in with his ‘Thousand’ and liberated the island from the Bourbons in grand style, resulting in every town on the island having a ‘Via Garibaldi’. When I wanted to program the GPS in the hire car for a town centre and didn’t have a specific street address, I knew I could rely on getting to the centre of town by putting in ‘Via Garibaldi’. There are those, I’m told, who no longer revere Garibaldi (the old ‘sold-out-to-the-north' tune) but Garibaldi remains rather legendary anyway.

Taormina

Sicily has been occupied by foreigners for about 3000 years – possibly a world record – which some say accounts for the rise of that other well-known Sicilian institution, the Mafia. Whether or not this foreign interference accounts for the hunkering down of the rural community into self-protecting gangs, who knows; but today the only evidence I (knowingly) saw of the Mafiosi was a moving monument on the autostrada near Palermo’s airport commemorating the spot where the anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone was blown to bits in 1992. One month later, the judge who replaced him, Paolo Borsellino, was also blown up after visiting his mother. The airport is now named Falcone-Borsellino.

Sicily’s occupiers started with the Carthaginians in about the 8^th century BC – Phoenicians from the Levant who had built the great city of Carthage in North Africa. They were followed by the Greeks, then some autonomous tyrants, the Romans of course, the Byzantine Christians, the Moors from Arabia for a few hundred years (fried food, sesame seeds, sweet-and-sour flavours); and then a succession of Europeans from Spain, England, and France....until Garibaldi and The Thousand appeared.

Taormina prepares for Palm Sunday.

And the topography? Very mountainous, lush agriculture, a wine industry that supplies a great percentage of the Italian wine production, a fishing industry which must surely do the same; plus honey and olives and salt retrieved from the sea by ancient evaporative methods; citrus everywhere; almond trees, olive trees...a cornucopia. In the past – the not very distant past – life was hard in small rural Sicilian towns, but at least they lived in paradise. In beautiful Palermo, the capital city, the climate becomes tropical in summer, and already the hibiscus, bougainvillea and frangipani are beginning to bloom.

Etna!!!!!

Cable car ascending Etna.

But Sicily is especially known for its volcanoes: Mt Etna (3,320 m) is the tallest active volcano in Europe and one of the most active in the world. It steams away on the horizon in north-eastern Sicily. In fact, there was an eruption about five days before I managed to travel up its slopes. The mountain was closed for the day: the eruption was described as ‘significant’ (rocks flung hundreds of metres into the air), but mercifully short (a few hours). So minor an incident for Etna, that it caused no real ripple nor news bulletins. The main issue which daunted my efforts to reach Etna was the foggy weather that shrouded the top of the mountain for a couple of days, but finally the clouds parted and I made a dash for it. Well, my guide and driver Carmelo made a dash for it...and then loaned me his jacket (“Its-a cold up there!”), put me on the chair lift and waved me off. The lift ascended through fog, arrived at a way station where jeep-style trucks were waiting; they ascended on a lava-grit road through ever-increasing snow drifts and more fog. Finally, spectacularly, we emerged above the fog and the steaming crater of Etna was revealed.

The fog rolls in again on Etna.

Off we tramped with a mountain guide, poked our noses into a smaller steaming vent – the guide assured us that this one would only send out steam now, no hot ash or lava – and climbed a ridge which was formed when Etna last really erupted, in 2001/02. The high point was 2, 950 m. On that occasion, several villages on the slopes of the mountain were damaged (I saw one Baroque church facade on the way up which was still propped up with girders and braces); and the roads and the tourist chair lift near the top had been destroyed. The ones we used were re-built since then. The snowy top of Etna, so close to the beach I had left that morning (only a 40 minute drive away), soon closed in with cloud again. I had been lucky to grab the opportunity.

Looking very pleased with self: on Mt Etna.

Guide Johanna and her red umbrella
In Taormina's Greek/Roman teatro.

Carmelo returned me to the hotel on the beach at Taormina, and I returned his jacket. Taormina is a town with a split personality: the main village is perched high on a rocky ridge, with the beach ‘burbs down below. A funicular (every 15 minutes) connects the two. I stayed in a hotel converted from a private villa, and funicular-ed up to see the village. Verdict? Picturesque, lovely shops and galleries, churches getting ready for the Palm Sunday service tomorrow, views to die for out across the coast. But Taormina’s big claim to fame is its unusual Greek theatre: the ruin is perched right atop the mountain. The Greeks didn’t use a backdrop for the stages of their theatres: the audience looking down at the players would have seen behind them an extraordinary view of the coast - and of Etna. The Romans, on the other hand, liked to erect ‘scenery’ – a back-drop to the stage, such as we use today and still call ‘scenery’. At Taormina, the Romans neither left the Greek theatre like it was (as in Siracusa) nor completely destroyed it. Instead, they built some obvious and interesting adaptations, including the aforementioned scenery (blocking the view somewhat), some porticoes entrances, some side dressing rooms, some pits for the animals they used, some extra seating. In the ruins today it is easy to see the hands of the Romans overlaying the hands of the Greeks. Molto interessante.

Back to the beach: Taormina

Ah, but that’s enough sightseeing – back to the Villa Sant’Andrea, some local fish courtesy of Vincenzo, the chef, perhaps preceded by a prosecco aperitif. Plenty of variety in Sicily.

Sicily: my route - Catania, Siracusa, Taormina,
Vulcano Is. (not on the map),
Trapani, Erice, Agrigento, Palermo.

Maps from:

http://www.1milliondollarphoto.com/phototrips-sicily.shtml

http://www.sicilianfamilytree.com/italytrip.html