Blogs from Sicily, Italy, Europe - page 9

Thursday March 29, 2018 - Another early day starting before 7am. I got on the road at 8:15 and didn’t arrive in Ragusa until almost 11am, with one bathroom/gas stop. It was my first time filling up here, and I was only just under half full. Part of me wanted to see if I could make the whole trip on one tank, but the other part decided it wouldn’t be worth getting stuck on the side of the road to find out. I wasn’t sure what to do, but a guy came up to me right away and asked if I wanted to do it myself or if he should do it. I said I’d do it, but he still helped me figure out how to charge it to my card, which was nice. It’s a ... read more

Tuesday March 27 2018 - I got up before 7am, got packed, had breakfast and still didn’t get out of there until almost 8:30. I had to drive about two hours to get to the Villa Romana del Casale, an ancient Roman house that was flooded and covered with mud, hidden for over 700 years. It had paid parking, which always seems insane to me when you have to drive to get there, and you’re paying to get in. At the ticket counter I asked if they had a discount for teachers. He said yes and I gave him my school ID. He balked because the date on the card said September 2017, and it was now March 2018. I’m not sure what he expected, since it’s for a whole school year, but he did eventually ... read more

Sunday March 25, 2018 - Of course it’s hard to go to sleep early on a Saturday night, even when you’re just home preparing for your trip. And of course you haven’t finished preparing for your trip because somehow you never learn. So you find yourself still awake at 11pm, knowing you have to get up at 4am AND daylight savings time starts that night, taking away yet another precious hour. So of course you wake up at 3:30 and can’t go back to sleep. I was on the tram by 5:14, waited 15 minutes for the bus to the airport and hungrily devoured all of the “driving in Sicily” materials I could get my hands on before I left. I was moderately terrified of driving abroad, and here I was starting in Sicily. Crazypants. I ... read more

We spent the past weekend homebound, as on Saturday we were recovering from our all-day outing to Agrigento the day before; and on Sunday the weather was positively wretched, with rain showers, wind and chilly temperatures throughout the day. So when we awoke to clear skies this morning, we were anxious to relieve our “cabin fever”. Our goal was to walk a section of Taormina we’d not yet explored, and then to stop by the tour agency office to see if it might be possible to arrange for a last-minute excursion to Mt. Etna before we leave. Unfortunately, the agency has not received enough reservations to satisfy its minimum requirements to conduct the tour. Just below the Corso Umberto stands the 14th century Palazzo Duchi di Santo Stefano, a masterpiece of Sicilian gothic architecture, with characteristic ... read more

Today we had arranged for guided tours of Palermo and Cefalù, cities that are the repositories of many Sicilian architectural and artistic treasures, including several of the most celebrated examples of Byzantine and Arab mosaics scattered throughout the island of Sicily. Both of these cities lie on the western side of the island, so the distances to be traveled from our base in Taormina required more than 6 hours in a tour bus; and a long, 13-hour-day from start to finish. We made it to the pick-up point at the Taormina bus terminal by 7 AM, where our 12-seat-capacity tour bus, driver and guide met us in short order. After a couple of stops on the way out of town to pick-up a few more passengers, we drove south toward Catania via Sicily’s superhighway system, where ... read more