Sicilian Diary

[Sorry about the layout of the pictures. I have yet to find out how to caption them and how to wrap the text round them. Pictures can be clicked on to enlarge them.]

For the last fortnight we've been in Sicily. We flew on Wednesday 18th April from London Stansted to Palermo by Ryanair. Not my favourite airline, and if we had any money and more time we'd go by train, a rather greener option.

We went with a smattering of Italian and the Rough Guide to Sicily, on the whole a good choice though it did let us down in Monreale as will be recounted. I had also looked at the Lonely Planet guide and rejected it as not as good as the Rough Guide. As it happened cousins stayed a couple of nights just before we left. They'd just spent five weeks in Sicily using the Lonely Planet book, but when they looked at our Rough Guide they said they wished they'd had that.

We'd booked our first few nights in Palermo before we left, and when we got into Palermo railway station off the bus from the airport at around 10 at night we had only a short walk to the Hotel Orientale. It is on the first floor of a grand but fading palazzo. You go in through a wicket gate in a large set of doors to a vast and gloomy courtyard inhabited by cars and cats. At the far end was a wide shallow staircase up to a landing, with staircases going off right and left. Our room was large and very high, with a balcony opening out onto the Via Maqueda, the main street of Palermo. Extremely noisy, night and day. The guide book says Mussolini stayed in our room. He would have had a job haranguing the crowds from that balcony. No-one would have heard a thing. One of the oddities of the room was the fact that the bathroom bolt was on the outside of the bathroom. You could lock someone in from the outside but if you were inside there was no way to keep the door properly shut.

The traffic in Palermo is quite something. Hardly a car doesn't have dents in the bodywork. They race everywhere and they park everywhere. The only thing that there is more of on the pavements than cars is dog shit. The idea of pavement hygiene does not appear to have arrived in Italy yet.

It turned out that just off our street was the Via Carmine which holds a street market of wonderful delights. Fresh fish stalls, and vegetable and fruit ones, predominated, but there were also stalls selling household goods. This goes on for what seems miles, so we wandered around on our first morning, eventually landing up at the cathedral.



It dates back to Norman times - quick history lesson - the Norman Hauteville family took over Sicily at around the same time that their cousin William was taking over England. They were displacing the Arabs, who had displaced Byzantine rule. Before the Byzantines there were the Romans who had conquered the island in the 200s BC from the Carthaginians and the Greeks. Under the Greeks there had been series of independent city states who for a time were the most powerful in the Greek world. End of historical diversion.
Back to the Cathedral. It was built by an Englishman, imported to be Archbishop by the first Norman ruler, Count Roger, in the 1100s. The outside is still Sicilian Norman and is lovely. The inside is a quite bad eighteenth century classical makeover, cold and heartless. But there's a nice crypt, with bishops in re-used Roman coffins, and a collection of tombs of the Norman rulers and their successors.

At lunch time we found a bar and did this every day during our whole stay. You go into the bar, choose your bit of pizza or sandwich and a beer from behind the counter, then take it outside to the tables provided. Some were remarkably cheap; in very touristy streets and squares they were more expensive but still cheap by our standards, especially if you drank the "birra nazionale" rather than imported brands. In the evenings we ate in restaurants. Rosalind likes fish so she was well catered for. I don't, so was usually confined to meat dishes, and once I cottoned on to the availability, a side dish of chips. There were lots of salads, which I don't eat, but no cooked vegetables except spinach, which is the one cooked veg I don't eat. This lack of veggies on the menu is odd, considering the mounds there are for sale in the markets.

That afternoon we took in some more churches, including La Martorana, full of Greek mosaics of the twelfth century and San Cataldo, next door but quite different. It has red Moorish domes and is almost bare inside. Restful.

Our next day, the Friday, was a chapter of small disasters. The Palazzo dei Normani, citadel of the Norman kings, is now mostly a barracks. However, it contains two gems open to the public, the heavily mosaiced chapel and the Royal apartments. The chapel, though obviously lovely, is covered in scaffolding inside at present as they conserve and repair the mosaics. This rather detracted from the experience. To get to the Royal apartments on the floor above we had to queue an hour with several school parties, waiting to be let in for guided tours. Italian school parties are ubiquitous and noisy. When we eventually got in we were able to give the guide the slip (nothing worse than a guided tour in a language you don't understand) and do the whole floor in ten minutes. The poor children are probably still there.

But it wasn't lunch time yet, and we were quite near the square where the buses depart for Monreale, so we bought tickets and waited for a bus. The Rough Guide says you can catch a 309 or a 389, but if you do the former there's a short walk to the main square of the town. This wasn't strictly accurate. We happened to catch the 309 and got off at the end of the route to discover that Monreale is halfway up a mountain and we were at the bottom. It took an hour in the midday sun to walk up into the town.



Monreale's claim to fame is the mosaics in the cathedral. King William (the Good) didn't get on with his English archbishop in Palermo, so five miles out of the city he set up another cathedral

and monastery in Monreale. It took six years to build, and was finished by 1180. The walls are covered by so many mosaics that it is said to contain the greatest area of medieval mosaics in any building in the world, and they are magnificent. They even include, in the apse among the great saints of the church, the figure of Thomas Becket, canonized only the year before the church was begun. He's the middle one in the picture.



I frightened myself when I went up onto the roofs. There are views right down into the valley and towards Palermo, but the walkways and stairs were narrow and exposed and I have little head for heights. It was almost as scary as going up to the dome of St Paul's in London. However, I always climb church towers when they are offered, despite the terror.


The cloister of the cathedral is Arabic in feel. Apart from the cathedral they seem to be the only part of the monastery left. The double columns are inlaid with mosaic and have fantastic capitals. The picture is of the fountain in one corner.


At least we were able to get the right bus back to Monreale.

Next day, Saturday 21st April, we went east along the north coast by train to Cefalu. It is quite a sweet little fishing town whose claim to fame is that its cathedral also has mosaics, like Palermo and Monreale, but forty years earlier. Unfortunately they are now confined to the apse due to a later baroque makeover, and the apse is roped off and can only be seen from a distance.

Walking back to the station we managed to take the wrong road. When we did get there we got on a train going further east instead of one going the other was back to Palermo. Life's like that when you only have a smattering of Italian and either ask the wrong question or misunderstand the answer to the right question. So we trundled a further thirty miles along the coast till we could get on a train going back the right way. Since the line mostly sticks to the coast it was not an unpleasant experience and fortunately the ticket inspectors in the next compartment didn't start checking tickets till we we back on the right side of Cefalu.

Sunday morning (22 April) saw us at the Regional Archaeological museum. It's in a 16th century convent and contains friezes and statues from some of the places we saw at the end of the holiday. Most places close on Sunday afternoons so we were reduced to visiting something we had said we
would probably not bother with, the Capuchin Catacombs, where the illustrious dead of Palermo were embalmed and placed on display. There they lie, or hang from the walls, in clothes black with dust and disintegrating. A few, in glass cases, show the original colours of their best costumes. A sad place. We got lost on the way there of course. On the way back, however, we did not get lost but fell in by accident with La Cuba, a sort of Norman keep which had once been part of a huge pleasure garden of the kings. Most of the ground is now built over but there are three of the original pavilions left, of which La Cuba is one. The others are spread about the town.

In the morning we'd seen a poster for a performance at a puppet theatre, so we arrived at around 5pm for the 5.30 performance. The chap at the door asked in German if we were part of "the group", which we weren't, but he took our money all the same and we took our seats in the front row. The theatre was just a large room in a side street near the cathedral.

Eventually "the Group" arrived, German to a man, and their leader proceeded to lecture them for half an hour on the history and significance of Sicilian Puppet Theatre. Everywhere we went on this holiday there would be groups of German tourists being lectured to by their guides. We would go into a church or temple, investigate it thoroughly over half an hour or so, and when we came out there would be the same poor German being lectured to still. I don't believe they ever actually see anything. They are just told about them. At length. I could understand enough to know where he was at each point of this puppet lecture, but it must have been a long boring drone even (or especially) for the people who did understand everything he was saying.

Then after another wait for a French party (who were not lectured to) the entertainment began. One gathers that Sicilian puppet theatre is mostly based on the chansons of the paladins - Charlemagne and Roland and all that lot. The puppets, about a metre long, are held by the puppeteer by a long metal post out of the top of their head, while strings work the arms and legs. The plot, such as it is, involves a bit of shouting between the Christians and then a lot of fighting between them and the Muslims. The Muslims lose every time. Some of the puppets had heads that came off at a sword stroke, some would be split lengthways down the body. Every scene ended in a sword fight, so you don't need any Italian to get the gist of what is going on. I think the whole play only lasted half an hour, then there were little glasses on some sort of sweet liqueur to send one on one's way. We did try to go to another puppet theatre in Syracusa, but I read the list of the days it was on wrong, so we missed the night.

On Monday 23 April we caught a bus at 8am for Siracusa. Palermo is near the top lefthand corner of the island; Siracusa is near the bottom of the righthand side. Took about three hours, travelling across the middle of the island, through the mountains, to the outskirts of Catania then south down the coast. Scenery lovely until the plain that Catania is on, but there in the distance was Etna, smoking away and in view for forty minutes or so.

Cousins had stayed in Sicily for some weeks and had come straight on to us, so we took their advice and stayed in the Hotel Posta, conveniently next to the bus station on the island of Ortygia. Like our previous hotel in Palermo it had fascist links - there was faded writing on the facade which seemed to proclaim its having been Fascist Party headquarters. Anyway, it was jolly nice. Our bedroom looked back at the mainland, was tall and airy, and despite being next to the bus station was miles quieter than the hotel in Palermo. It is next to an old post office building, now derelict, but very handsome. In the picture of the channel between Ortygia on the right and the mainland on the left the PO is the building just left of centre and the hotel is just to its right. The whole of Ortygia is full of cranes and building work as crumbling palazzos are restored.

The island of Ortygia, about seventy yards, if that, off the mainland, was the centre of a Corinthiann colony, founded in 733BC. It is now connected to the mainland by three bridges. In time it became the greatest city in the Mediterranean world. Athens sent the Great Expedition against it in 413BC, to teach it a lesson. The Athenians lost. Two hundred years later Siracusa sided with the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War. The city was besieged by the Romans for two years, but despite the best efforts of the ingenious Archimedes, a native of the place, it fell in 211BC.

On our first afternoon there we wandered around Ortygia getting our bearings. In the centre in Greek times there was a wonderful temple of Athena, one of those famously plundered by the Roman governor Verres (see Robert Harris's novel about Cicero, Imperium). It still stands, because the Christians took it over as a church. They filled in the spaces on the outside between the pillars, and the solid-walled cella inside was pierced to form arched openings. Since 640AD it has been the local cathedral. The facade is baroque because the earthquake of 1693 destroyed the previous Norman front, but the visible side has a Norman battlement. It is quite moving to sit in a building which has been a centre of worship since around 530BC.

Tuesday 24 April. Quite a warm day. We walked through the new city to the classical sites on the hill behind it. There's a Greek theatre, quite large, a Roman amphitheatre, and some huge quarries where all the stone to build such places came from.

But first we visited the Archaeological Museum of Siracusa. Modern, and craftily arranged, it is one of the best museums, both for layout and contents that I have ever seen. So much has been found in the province round about that what they have on display would make half a dozen extremely good smaller museums which would be the pride of any towns that owned them. Particularly good are a Roman copy of a Greek Venus and a fourth century marble sarcophagous discovered in 1872 in the catacombs next door.

Which is where we went next, to the Basilica di San Giovanni and its catacombs. The former is a ruin, but they take you down the catacombs (annoyingly, no photography allowed), which are quite impressive. There's another lot nearby, under a ruined church dedicated to St Lucia, the most extensive in Italy after Rome apparently, but they aren't open - ever.

The Greek theatre is huge, but unfortunately when we were there carpenters were erecting seating over the rough marble original seats, for a theatre season they run from mid May. The quarries, or Latomie were more impressive, with vertical walls, lemon orchards in the bottom, and a natural cave called the Orrechio di Dionisio. The quarries weren't so pleasant for the 7000 Athenian survivors of the Great Expedition who were enslaved here for seven years.

Next morning, Wednesday 25 April, St Mark's Day and Liberation Day in Italy, was a public holiday, which meant much of the country closed down. We spent a quiet day, pottering around. Rosalind had this sore foot she'd twisted ten days before we set off for Sicily, and the day before she'd walked it very hard, so we were glad of a quieter day. But we did discover, off the square of the Duomo, a series of tunnels. They partly dated back to Greek times - a passing inhabitant pointed out that the tunnel we were in at the time might well have been walked in by Archimedes - were partly part of a water system (you enter a chamber which was the cistern of the bishops' palace above) and in the Second World War were used as bomb shelters. The Allies bombed Siracusa heavily. Malta isn't far away so Siracusa's German airfields were a great threat. The tunnels had many exits during the war, but the one in use now when they are open to the public is almost at the waterside, next to the Fonte Aretusa. This is a large pond fed by freshwater springs almost at the edge of the bay. Nelson took on water there before going on to win the Battle of the Nile. Now it has papyrus in the middle and ducks round the edges. Papyrus is a stately and most beautiful plant. There are quite a lot of workshops producing the writing material derived from it in Siracusa - for reasons I will come to later.

There was some discussion between us as to what we should do the next day. The choice was Taormina or Noto. The former is on the coast just north of Etna. Very beautiful, with views of the volcano and the sea. However getting to it would involve travelling an hour to Catania and then on another hour on to Taormina. So we plumped for Noto, allegedly less than an hour's bus ride southwest from Siracusa. It was my sixtieth birthday, so we wanted to have a pleasant day.

We bought our bus tickets and waited for the bus. When it didn't come we and several others went to ask about it at the ticket office. It was in ritardo or some such expression said the young toad who ran the office. Well he hadn't said that when we'd bought the tickets from him a little while before. It was going to be an hour late. Here the advantage of having a hotel room opposite the bus stop came into play. We were able to sit on our balcony and watch out for the bus while the rest of the putative passengers had to lean against walls in the street.

It did arrive eventually, and we were in Noto in time for lunch. Noto was one of those places that was destroyed in the 1693 earthquake. It was rebuilt, to strict baroque architectural principles, on a new site about six miles away. Its a gem, all of a piece, and built in a lovely, but soft, red sandstone. So soft that in 1996 the dome of the cathedral fell down in a thunderstorm.

The main axis of the town is a road on a contour about halfway down the hill it stands on. The road keeps opening out into little squares, and there churches, public buildings, and of course the cathedral which looks as if it is very near completion. Two churches allow you to climb to the rooftops where the views are of the town, below and above, the cathedral of course, right opposite, and even the sea in the far distance.











Friday 27 April. Pottering along the edge of the harbour we discovered that a boatman was offering trips across the bay into the mouth of the Ciane River on the mainland. The special thing about this river is that a mile or two from the sea there is a pool that is claimed to be the only place in the world outside Egypt that papyrus grows wild. The legend of the pool is that it was formed by the tears of the nymph Cyane when her mistress Persephone was abducted into the underworld be Hades. The history of the papyrus is that it was a gift of Ptolemy Philadelphus, Pharoah of Egypt, to the tyrant Hieron II (d.215BC). This ready source of supply explains the little papyrus industry round Siracusa.

We had the boat to ourselves apart from the boatman. Good views of Ortygia as we sailed away from the island, then we entered the Ciane. It is canalised in a deep cutting, but pleasant and cool, shaded by trees and orchards. The pool is really a series of pools and the papyrus is thick and impressive. On the way back to the mouth we passed two similar boats, packed to the gunnels with about twenty American tourists in each, on their way to the pool. We felt rather privileged in our own uncrowded craft.

The trip only lasted half the morning, and the highlight of the rest of the day was a visit to a Jewish mikveh, or ritual bath. It isn't in the guide books, but a party at the table next to us one night in a restaurant told us about it. When the Jews were expelled from Spain c.1493 the Spanish rulers of Sicily did the same. The Siracusan Jews, not wishing their religious site to be profaned simply filled it in with rubble and it was lost until about ten years ago. It sits around fifty feet below the ground level of a palazzo which is now a hotel. It is a low vaulted chamber around 5m square, with three tiny stepped pools in the middle and two private ones in cubicles off at the sides. The spring which feeds it is still so powerful that every night, when the pumps are turned off, the water level rises several feet above the floor. It is thought the original outlet must be still blocked. Its a moving place. Unfortunately the hotel doesn't allow visitors to photograph, so I have had to use one from their brochure, which isn't very good.

Saturday 28th April. We set off in a hire car to get to Agrigento, on the south coast of the island and roughly due south of Palermo. Had I planned better we would have gone there by train or bus on a day trip from Palermo while we were there. It turned out that public transport between Agrigento and Siracusa is virtually non-existent, so we made the best of a bad job and hired a little car from Avis for the weekend. Rosalind did all the driving, and coped very well. I wouldn't have. I navigated, or tried to. We missed our road out of Siracusa, then got lost in another town, but eventually made the right road. We were making our way to the middle of the island rather than going straight to Agrigento, because one of the most interesting of all Sicily's historic sites is just outside a town called Piazza Armerina.

Saturday lunchtime was not a good one for passing through Piazza Armerina. Like many Sicilian inland towns it is built on a hill, with the cathedral on top. We managed to find a parking place in a tiny square and walked up to the Duomo, which was of course closed. But there was a bar in the bleak square outside, so we had some lunch and then negotiated our way out of the town to the Villa Romana del Casale. On the side of a still wooded valley, the remains of this extremely large site consist of four groups of buildings with walls of up to about eight feet extant. Someone quite important must have built it, possibly Diocletian's Caesar, or junior emperor, around 300AD. The authorities have covered the site in transparent plastic roofing to protect the glory of the place, the wonderful floor mosaics, many of hunting and fishing scenes. The complex could have been a hunting lodge/palace. You see mosaics from walkways above, but photography is difficult because the floors are dusty. And, I only realised later, the girders holding up the plastic roof cast shadows. Had I noticed this I might have tried using a flash, but the probably wouldn't have worked anyway.



We'd chosen our time right, very early afternoon, because this meant that most of the many coach parties were at lunch. And fortunately it was a bit cloudy. We'd been warned that on a sunny day the greenhouse effect of plastic roofs and herds of people make it unbearably hot inside. It was well worth the detour it took us to get there. Now we turned southwest and made for Agrigento which we arrived at around five in the afternoon.

It is a motorist's nightmare - vertical streets, millions of cars, no parking. When we'd at last located our B&B, booked previously by email from the hotel in Siracusa, it was 6pm so we went to have a quick look at the Valley of the Temples. The modern city stands on a high ridge a mile or so inland from the sea. Halfway between it and the sea is a lower ridge, on which the remains of the Greek temples of the 5th century BC stand. (see picture left) When we'd eventually negotiated the flyovers and motorways out of the town, and come back from Porto Empedocle, the local seaport, we found ourselves with an hour to see the main temples. In fact the site stayed open till eight and we walked up this glorious ridge in the cool evening light, with few trippers around, and saw the temples. They appear to be the local place of choice to have your wedding photos taken. The lass on the right, with her husband in a white flat cap, where one of two bridal parties we saw. A magic ninety minutes.





Sicily was a palette of colours everywhere we went.








Next morning, Sunday 29 April we took advantage of having the car to drive a couple of hours west along the coast to Selinunte, another classical Greek site. Unlike Agrigento it was right on the sea, with a group of temples a little further inland away from the main acropolis, and now separated from it by a flowerfilled valley. It suffered badly from Carthaginians and earthquakes and after 250BC the site was only occasionally briefly inhabited. Its a lonely place (if you discount the hordes of tourists), miles from anywhere, and has a peace of its own amongst the tumbled columns. We walked in the midday sun between the sites, probably a mistake, but the views as we went up and down the valley could be savoured in a way you couldn't in a five minute car journey.





It was still light when we got back to Agrigento. We tried to get into the Archaeological Museum but it was shut, it being Sunday afternoon, so we took walk through the dirty and shabby streets to the cathedral of the top of the town. It too was shut and miserable. Its inland side is on the top of a precipice, and every few years a bit slides into the ravine behind. Going back down the hill into the town, along alleyways and down steps we came upon Santa Maria dei Greci, a tiny church built, the guidebook said, into a Greek temple. It should have been shut, but a baptism party was just coming out and we were able to slip in for a few minutes. Not only can you see the pillars of the Greek temple in the walls, as at Siracusa, but recently the stone floor of the church at the altar end has been replaced by glass. The space beneath the glass, two to three metres deep, is lit up, so you can see the bottoms of the pillars and stone seats of the temple below you. An example of really imaginative restoration and preservation.

Next day, Monday 30th April we took the car back and wandered around Agrigento a couple of hours before our train left at 11 for Palermo. Agrigento does have its nice bits, but on the whole is a bit scruffy. We did find an interesting local museum though. I liked the ex votos pictured left.









The train took a couple of hours through the mountains to get to Palermo where we checked into a hotel near the station and went off to find some lunch. Unfortunately the pizza I had in quite a smart restaurant in the square outside San Domenico church had a chunk of glass in the middle and I bit down on it quite hard. I was worried both as to whether I had broken a tooth and as to whether I had swallowed any glass, but apart from sore teeth for a couple of days had no ill-effects. The restaurant didn't charge for the pizza.

Our last day, Tuesday 1 May, was a bit of an anti-climax. A public holiday of course, so shops were shut and we were lucky to get any lunch. However we wandered down towards the port in the morning. A church called La Magione was open - Arab-Norman architecture and palm trees (the two pictures below are of the different sides of the cloister - and another roofless shell called Lo Spasimo. And the lovely Galleria Regionale full of medieval Sicilian art.












Here are a few pictures from the Galleria Regionale.




In the afternoon there really was nothing open at all, so after we'd sat in gardens near the seafront in a howling gale for an hour or two I at last persuaded Ros that if we were going to be bored we might as well be so at the airport, so we retrieved our cases from the hotel and caught the airport bus. The journey takes around fifty minutes, but a few miles out in the suburbs a car came out of a side road without looking and the bus driver could not avoid hitting it. No-one was hurt, but we spent twenty minutes blocking the traffic while much shouting, handwaving and form filling went on outside. But it all seemed to end amicably and we eventually drove off.

And that really was the end of the holiday. We arrived home around 1am, rescued two tons of post and went to bed.