Blogs from Sicily, Italy, Europe - page 10

Love our place...it has five rooms...we could actually lose sight of each other... A lovely bottle of Sicilian wine & biscotti welcomed us last night. Today we headed into the Teatro Massimo centre for info gathering & a wander. Their info centres here are just great for anything you need to know....one Sicilian lady & maps & timetables later we left with a nice experience of being very welcome.. Viap Maqueda area has some quite fascinating architecture dating from 1140. Love the faces in the advertising photo! A little more grocery shopping & home for the afternoon.. 6.15pm we headed out before dark & made our way to Teatro Massimo to catch the City Circut bus, all the street lights coming on & most monumental places lit up. Complete circut was 50mins & there was often ... read more

We've had a hectic couple of days so we decide to relax at the nice beach that we drove to on the other side of the bay from Ortigia earlier in the week. We're tired so we sleep in. As we're about to walk out the door we happen to read a notice that was sent to us when we booked the apartment advising us that the car park's closed between 10am and 8pm on Sundays. It's Sunday today and it's now 10.30am. I walk there in the hope that the attendants overdid the limoncello last night and have now forgotten what day it is, but of course they haven't. We Google buses to the village near the beach, but there are none, and Google says it'll take two hours to walk there, so that seems ... read more

Issy decides to pass on today's scheduled visit to Mount Etna so that she can do some relaxing. I retrieve our trusty little Fiat 500 from the garage. It seems to be taking a long time to appear, and when it finally does it's a bit hard not to notice the multitude of hand prints on the bonnet and boot from being pushed into and out of its tiny parking spot. I turn off the motorway near Catania and start to climb the constantly smoking mountain. It's a sunny day, but very hazy. The road's very windy and climbs through a landscape of black volcanic rock, interspersed with the occasional valley of trees. It's a bit hard not to notice a series of concrete block walls with past lava flows seemingly dammed up behind them, and ... read more

Today we decide to head to the ancient hilltop town of Ragusa which is about an hour and a half's drive south west of Siracusa. We manage to navigate our way off Ortigia and then hit a traffic jam. We did a lot of homework this morning on how to get to the motorway. This relied on us passing the very prominent Siracusa Pantheon, which is a distinctive large round building visible from everywhere in Ortigia and Siracusa… well it was yesterday. I guess it’s possible someone moved it overnight. We’re now lost, but we plough bravely on, and eventually find our way through the maze out onto the motorway. We pass multiple signs telling us to slow down as we approach a toll booth. There don’t seem to be any people in the booth, and ... read more

I head down for my last breakfast here in Lipari. The staff have stuck the handle back on the hotel's front door so it looks much better now. I notice a copy of "The Godfather" on the bookshelf in reception and wonder what the significance of this might be. The hotel dog doesn't seem to remember me from yesterday and tries to bite my arm off yet again. That aside we've really enjoyed our time here and we're very sad to be leaving. We catch the ferry across to Milazzo on Sicily's north-east tip where we've arranged to hire a car. We're told that it's our lucky day, and that we've been upgraded. In our experience this usually means a bigger vehicle, but as we wander up and down the street outside we can't seem to ... read more