Ragusa Ibla

Last summer, while we were biding our time waiting for the sale of our new house to go through, Nick and I had the opportunity to visit a few places in Sicily that we hadn't seen before.  We didn't always agree on the destination - usually I wanted to go to the places that were close-by and Nick would more often choose places that were farther away.  I did the driving so Nick often would go along with what I suggested, but there were a couple of places that Nick really wanted to see that were quite far from Cianciana.  One was the Acantara Gorge from the previous post.  Another one was Ragusa Ibla.

Ragusa Ibla lies in the south-east corner of Sicily, below Ragusa Superiore.  The original Ragusa was built on the side of a steep hill.  In 1693, the area was hit with a severe earthquake and the town was destroyed, sliding to the bottom of the hill.  Instead of relocating the town, the townsfolk decided that they would rebuild in the same place.  As most of the rebuilding happened in the 1700s, the town today is filled with wonderful baroque architecture.  Many of the people moved to the upper part of the town - Ragusa Superiore, but some still stayed in the lower part - Ragusa Ibla.  While some of Ragusa Ibla is now falling down, some is still standing and is being maintained beautifully.  A stunning example of this is the Cathedral of San Giorgio.

What I loved most about Ragusa Ibla were the winding, narrow streets that took us to surprising places.  We followed one up a set of stairs and past some lovely old row houses - well kept and striking.  We rounded a corner and found ourselves walking along a narrow path lined with baroque shells.  This wasn't apparent immediately until I put my face up to a couple of the windows and found that the interior of the houses dropped two floors to what had become a grass-strewn yard over the years.  Some of these interiors now had trees growing inside them, yet from the outside it looked like you could knock on the door and someone's nonna would answer and beckon you in for a glass of wine or a cup of espresso.

Enjoy here some of my pictures of the buildings in Ragusa Ibla.

For more information about this stunning corner of Sicily, I would recommend you read Baroque Sicily by Jann Huizenga.  Jann lives in Ragusa Ibla and her blog is full of interesting bits of info and lovely pictures about the area.

Alcantara Gorge

GOLE ALCANTARA

Not far from the resort town of Taormina and the slopes of Mount Etna is a stunning gorge formed by the hundreds of lava flows with which Etna has gifted the surrounding areas.  The walls of the gorge reminded me of my mother's pottery studio - the pile of discarded clay that was thrown on piece by piece until she had created a multi-layered ceramic checkerboard.  These towering walls, amazingly, were home to small cacti growing between the cracks.

Cactus growing on the walls of the gorge.

The gorge, or gole in Italian, has 4 hiking trails.  Nick and I took the shortest one, about 1.5 km.  It was a roasting hot day, when we were there - 38 degrees Celcius.  As we walked along the pathways, I found myself grateful for the shade along the path and also for the occasional 'mister' that sprayed cool water over us.  The path took us to lovely viewpoints that gave us glimpses of the river below.

After a nice lunch, we took the elevator down to the river beach. (Yes, an elevator!).  The edge of the river was filled with people - elderly nonnas with their toddler grandchildren in tow, young German women sunbathing topless, middle-aged British men in baggy shorts, Italian men strutting in speedos with gold chains tangled in their chest hair, and shapely young Italian women with perfect make-up and perfect hair wearing brightly coloured bikinis.  

As we made our way down to the river's edge there was a large sign written in Italian, English, German and Spanish warning us that the river was frigidly cold and we should only spend a few minutes in the water.  I stepped in the water.  While chilly, it was most definitely not frigid.  I grew up on the mountains to the north of downtown Vancouver, Canada.  I spent my summers swimming in the snow run-off in Lynn Canyon.  The water here in the gorge was not so cold.

Nick and I made our way to a little beach in the shade of the tall walls.  While he sat on the beach, I walked against the current as far up the river as I was allowed to go before I hit the river rapids.  The walls of the gorge rose up on each side like the dome of a cathedral.  The only sound was the echo of the rushing of the water.  There was a nearly spiritual feel to the place and I felt my cheeks start to hurt, I was grinning so hard at this amazing experience.  Everyone I passed who was walking the other way in the river had the same grin and was sharing the same experience.

I probably stayed in the water for over an hour.  It was a magical day.  Both Nick and I left feeling that it was an afternoon well spent, although I must admit, I suspect one reason Nick was so pleased with the day had something to do with the topless sunbathers!

Crazy things I never knew about Sicily

I have never been much for using travel guides.  Whenever I have travelled in the past, I have depended on advice from the people I met locally to find the restaurants, hotels, and the most interesting sites.  Nick, on the other hand, would pack every book we owned on Italy if we had space and unlimited luggage weight.  This trip, I managed to keep him down to two books: Top 10 Sicily and the Cadogan guide on Sicily.

While I haven't read a lot of travel guides, I am a reader.  I usually have either a stack of real or virtual books sitting next to my bed waiting for me to read them and this trip was no different with one exception - I didn't bring enough reading material.  After the last of my books were finished, I found myself rummaging around in my husband's suitcase to see if there were any books that I didn't know about.

So, after finding no fiction (I prefer fiction over nonfiction and fantasy over everything else) I picked up Nick's Cadogan guide to Sicily and Top 10 Sicily and started reading.  The Cadogan guide was written by Dana Facaros & Michael Pauls.  I haven't read (to my knowledge) anything else by these two but just from this guide I suspect these two have a terrific sense of humour.  As I read their guide, I kept coming across crazy things about Sicily that I had never heard before and as I did I would turn down the corner of the page so I could find them again and read them to Nick.  So, having compiled my list here is my top 10 countdown of the crazy things I never knew about Sicily.

10. Sicily was under Byzantine rule in the 7th century ruled by Emperor Constans II.  He was the first Emperor to travel to Sicily after the fall of Rome.  He was seriously considering moving the Byzantine capital onto Sicilian territory at Syracusa when a courtier, furious over the slight to Constantinople, approached Constans II in the bath and killed him with a soap dish.

9. Arguably, one of history's most interesting mystic characters was Count Alessandro Cagliostro, born Guiseppe Balsamo in Palermo in 1743.  He became adept at the use of pharmaceuticals and a master at forgery and through these talents scammed and conned his way into the highest of high society throughout western Europe.  His greatest coup as a con man involved convincing a goldsmith that he had discovered a cave on Monte Pellegrino that was full of treasure but guarded by devils who could only be lured away with 60 ounces of gold.  The goldsmith brought the gold to the mountain but the "devils" (Cagliostro's accomplices) came out and beat the poor goldsmith until he ran away and they scarpered with the gold.

8. On the same theme of scam artists in Palermo, this story happened much more recently.  In 2005, a Palermitani couple bilked a poor woman out of 50,000 euros.  How did they do this?  They claimed to be vampires so convincingly that she truly believed that they would come and impregnate her with the Antichrist if she failed to pay up.

7.  Lampedusa is a small, but stunningly beautiful island off the south coast of Sicily.  It is about 20 square kilometres with a population of 4500.  Its industries are fishing, agriculture and tourism.  In 1987, Libya shot two scud missiles at Lampedusa.  Fortunately for the Lampedusians, the aim of the Libyan military was not so great and the missiles fell into the sea. This was apparently in retaliation for the American bombings of Tripoli and Benghazi.  Apparently the Libyans had a map in which the 51st US state was Lampedusa.  (Just kidding).

6. This one actually didn't come from my guidebooks but is one that I had seen on the television show Urban Legends and found later on the Internet.  Starting in January 2004, in the tiny village of Canneto di Caronia, appliances in people's homes would burst into flame without warning.  This moved from appliances to non-electrical things like mattresses and chairs.  The fires became so frequent that the region's fire brigade set up permanent residence in Canneto di Caronia.  People began to leave the town, rather than live under the constant threat of fire.  Other residents believed that it was supernatural in origin and turned to the Church to perform exorcisms.  After a month, the fires began to diminish.  No one has any explanation for the fires.  And to continue on the mystic theme...

5. In Enna, in the absolute centre of Sicily (a.k.a. Umbilicus Sicilae or Sicily's navel), stands the Torre di Federico II.  Other than being in the centre of Sicily, the spot has other significance.  It is the crossroads of ancient Sicily's three main thoroughfares which symbolize the Trinacria found on the Sicilian flag.  The tower, however, is a mystery.  Octagonal in shape, it has no known purpose.  Federico II built the Castel del Monte in Puglia on the mainland which is also octagonal in shape and also has no know purpose.

In the 1960s, historian Umberto Massocco theorized that the spot was the centre of ley lines, similar to the ones found in England.  On these lines can be found a variety of landmarks of historical and spiritual importance: Agrigento, Eraclea Minoa, Syracusa, and numerous others.  His suggestion was that the whole island of Sicily is a large geometrical temple.

4.  Many people know the story of Archimedes running down the street yelling "Eureka", but if you don't, here it is.  Archimedes, also known as the Wizard of Syracuse, was a mathematician and the cousin of Hieron II.  Hieron had commissioned a golden crown to present to the gods at Delphi.  Once the crown was finished, he asked Archimedes to find a way to ensure that the goldsmith had not cheated him and used a cheaper metal on the inside.  While sitting in the bathtube in his home in Syracuse, Archimedes came up with the idea of using displacement to prove if the crown was solid gold or not.  So excited by his discovery, he jumped out of his bath and ran naked down the streets of Syracuse shouting "Eureka!!!"

3. Sicilian history seems to be full of magicians and wizards.  Somerset Maugham wrote a story called "The Magician"which was based on the true-to-life story of Aleister Crowley, originally from Leamington, England.  Crowley was referred to as the Magician of Cefalu'.  Cefalu' is a tourist town with a stunning bay and white glowing beach.  To see this town, one would never guess that it had hosted a cult centred on drugs, sex and black magic.  Crowley established the Abbey of Thelema to hold "rites" that would, he said, be the successor to Christianity.  Crowley referred to himself as "The Beast" and encouraged people to do whatever they pleased, no matter how perverse.  He was famous for his pornographic murals and his book "Diary of a Drug Addict".  Eventually he was thrown out of Italy by Mussolini.  In 1947, on his death, his will requested that he be buried in Cefalu'.  The town of Cefalu' denied his request. (I wonder why?!?)

2. The little village of Villalba is at first glance an ordinary Sicilian village - no particular reason to visit this village over any other except for this.  Near the village is Pizzo di Lauro, a mountain peak.  Rumour has it that the greatest treasure in all the world is hidden on this peak.  According to Facaros and Pauls, this treasure is said to be guarded by fairies living in a palace.  People trying to find the treasure disappear on the mountain and all that can be found of them is the sound of their groans, moaning the following:

Pizzo di Lauro, for your riches
We have lost our lives and our salvation.

And finally, my favourite crazy story about Sicily is...

1. In 1064, the Normans made their first attempt to attack and seize Palermo.  Sadly, they bivouacked up a hill covered with a particular species of tarantula whose bites caused the soldiers to suffer from a very unpleasant attack of painful farts, thus ending their first attack on Palermo.

No one could make this stuff up.  Seriously.

Catch Up Time

Our Sicilian Home

It has been about seven weeks since Nick and I got back from Sicily.  We hit the ground running here and this is the first chance I have had to really do any writing for the blog.  So, those of you waiting for updates on our Sicilian home, my apologies.

August 24^th, after we arrived back in Canada we got the email we were waiting for.  Joe, our terrifically helpful realtor, sent us the word:

I was going to write to you this morning to tell you the good news that we signed the deeds on Thursday afternoon…  Congratulations!   Joe

Celebrating the purchase of our house with Joe our realtor (in the middle)
and Scott our contractor (on the right) the day we left Cianciana.  Nick is on the left.

And then September 6^th we got word from Scott, our equally terrific contractor/renovator saying that the work was underway.  Of course, the path of renovation never runs completely smoothly. 

…there has been a small glitch in that it has rained this week quite heavily and has unveiled that the terrace in front of the kitchen has some severe leaks through to the room below…

and

… we have been having some problems with the neighbour who is complaining that damp rising from the wall between your garage and his kitchen is ruining his kitchen. He would like to put the problem right between you…

Fortunately, the solutions to the problems have proven to be fairly easy and not too expensive – certainly not compared to the glitches we had when we renovated our Canadian house!  The leak was fixed by removing the tiles from the terrazza, laying a waterproof membrane and re-tiling with new tiles.  About 800 euros well spent.

As for the neighbour’s kitchen…our ground floor walls had been covered with a horrible vinyl wall covering that we had wanted to get rid of anyhow. 

Our ground floor.  All of these walls are now down and are stripped back to the stone.

Scott removed all the wall covering and then the render (probably plaster) on top of the stone walls.  What will most likely happen next is to let the walls dry over time and see if this improves the situation with the neighbour’s kitchen.  If not, then there is some treatment that can be done to the stone that will help take care of the damp.  I must say that when Scott emailed us with a “damp problem”, I was a bit terrified.  In Vancouver and on Vancouver Island, “damp” is associated with “leaky condo syndrome”, which frequently costs the owners tens of thousands of dollars.  But the removal of the rendering added only 150 euros to our bill.  With luck, that’s all we will have to do and we will be left with a ground floor that has beautiful exposed stone.

In the meantime, Scott sent us pictures of how the kitchen will look...

...and today we heard that he is removing the asbestos roof from the storage room on the terrazza and replacing it with a new and non-cancer causing roof.

The storage room on our top terrazza.

We picked a new colour and new tiles for the outside of the house.  Before we left Cianciana, we walked around the town and looked at colours and tiles that other people had used.  The house is on a narrow street so we thought a bright colour would be better.

Our house will look like this on the outside.

All in all, work is progressing well and we are counting the days until we land in Sicily again in 274 days (but who’s counting!)

COUNTDOWN TIMER WIDGET

Cianciana Life: Saturday Evening – Espresso and Ferraris

In the evening, after we have changed from our pool wear, we do our passagiata or walkabout.  Every evening there are hundreds of people walking about, however tonight it seems that more than half the town is out.  Young girls dressed in their very best – stiletto heels balancing on cobblestones, hair and make-up perfect, they look very much as if they attending a film or art gallery opening rather than the requisite evening walkabout in a small Sicilian town.  Young men, hair precisely quaffed into a faux-hawk, crisp and clean polo shirts with the collars turned up.  They eye the girls who pretend they don’t see them but giggle anyways.  Old men sit on the benches outside the social club, discussing the problems of the world – young people, politics, employment – finding solutions that only they will hear.  Visitors – expats and ex-Ciancianese alike, wander and admire the buildings, and discuss what a terrific place this is.  Occasionally you see a husband and wife walking arm in arm.  This is an influence of the large expat community – it is most definitely not a regular occurrence amongst the older Sicilians. Once we reach the centre of town we see why so many people are out and about.  The Ferrari club from Ribera (a larger nearby city) has come to Cianciana.  The roads have been blocked off to regular traffic and the drivers are giving the local kids (mostly boys) rides up and down the town, engines roaring and tires spinning.  

Later, they park their Ferraris, mostly cherry red, on Corso Vittorio Emmanuel outside one of the larger bars in Cianciana.  The Ciancianese (and the expats as well) flock around these machines and take pictures.  Nick and I are not immune to the excitement and we take our pictures with these powerful cars as well.  On an island with an unemployment rate at 25%, I wonder how so many people in such a small town can afford a Ferrari.  Unsure, I guess that the answer may lie in the ancient houses.  Very few of these houses have mortgages.  They have been passed from grandparents to parents to children.  With no rent or mortgage to pay, it is perhaps easier to live if one is under employed or unemployed.  This is simply conjecture on my part.  I really don’t know the answer.

Later we wander back in the direction of our favourite bar.  One of our newly made friends, Gaetano, stops us.  Are we going to stay for the music?  It is supposed to start at 9:30 – in 15 minutes.  There will be a live band and dancing.  Sit, sit!  Have a caffe’!  We join Gaetano at one of the tables set out on the street.  He buys us each il caffe’, an espresso, and we sit and chat about Cianciana in the summer.  Gaetano was born in Cianciana.  Now he lives alone – no wife or children, but his sister lives here too.  He tells us about the clock tower – built in 1908 – and how life here has changed over the years.  

He tells us how in the summer, people stay out until two or three in the morning and the bar doesn’t close until 4am.  We chat for nearly two hours but there is no music.  The instruments are set up and from time to time someone – presumably musicians – come to fiddle with the set up but no music plays.  Finally, we take our leave of Gaetano.  

My eyelids are growing heavy.  I obviously don’t have the stamina of the Ciancianese.  As we walk home I hear thunder roll and see lightening flash off in the distance.  Once in the house, we sit at the kitchen table to drink a glass of water before we go to bed.  In the distance we can hear the music start.  A rock version of Volare.  Later in the night I wake, cold for the first time since we arrived here.  It is raining – hard.  The water drums on the terracotta tiles outside our window.  I listen to the sound until it sooths me back to sleep.

Cianciana Life: Saturday Afternoon – Return from Santo Stefano di Quisquina and the Summer Pool Club

Before we leave the forest of Quisquina, we sit in the car, air-conditioning cranked to full, and drink the now warm water that we brought with us.  The peaches are warm too, but the warmth brings out the sweetness and the flavour.  When I close my eyes the peaches seem to taste of the tan and orange hills that are ubiquitous throughout this part of Sicily.  Having forgotten to bring a knife, we bite into the cucumber and pass it back and forth.  

Even though the cucumber has been sitting in the warm car, it still tastes of the cool earth and freshens our mouths after the sweetness of the peaches.  We reluctantly leave the pine forest and drive the two or three minutes into the town of Santo Stefano.  We need to make one more stop before heading home.  Gelato.  We stop at a little sports bar.  These bars, besides selling beer, wine and a variety of hard liquor, also sell panini, pizza, and the beautiful thing that is gelato.  Nick gets his gelato in a cup but I ask for mine in a brioche.  What a wonderful idea to take the sweet freshness that is gelato or granita (sherbet), slicing open a sweet bun and scooping it in.  This is heaven.  We sit watching formula one car-racing coming from Germany on the bar’s television.  This is the first television we have seen in a week and, while I enjoy it while we delight in our gelato, I am not reluctant to leave it behind when we leave the bar.

By the time we return home it is 1:00 pm.  The streets are virtually empty and the shops are all closed.  It is the beginning of the hottest part of a very hot day – the sign above the farmacia says that the temperature has hit 37°.  Not the hottest day we have encountered but today there is no breeze on the now quiet street making it feel like the hottest.  Time to nap.  In her book, Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes says that these few hours – approximately 1:00 – 4:00 – are prime time for television, and the hours when most babies are conceived.  It is also when many people nap and Nick and I, every day, make use of this time to sleep through the worst of the heat. 

Nick and I wake at 3:00 to the sound of the clock tower.  It is still hot and we are sticky from the sweat in our sleep.  We had heard that there were two swimming pools in town and one we passed one our initial drive into town.  A swim seems like a perfect idea.  Back into the car with the air-conditioning on full, we drive about 4 minutes to the turn off marked by a small sign demurely saying “Summer Pool Club”.  We follow the bouncy dirt road until we reach a parking lot much less demurely decorated with large flags from many countries.  No Canadian flag.  We determine that when we return next summer, we will have to correct that deficit.  A wall of green fabric surrounds the pool.  We poke our heads over the cloth to see a beautiful, clean pool surrounded by deck chairs, tables and umbrellas.  To the side is a bar.  On the far side, the forever amazing views of the mountains and valleys created a beautiful backdrop.  This doesn’t just look like a pool – this is a resort. 

For a mere 3 euros each we enter the pool, change, shower, and done the requisite bathing caps (you can purchase them there for 1 euro) and jump into the pool.  It is perfect balance between warm and cool and we gratefully feel the warmth of the day drift away from our bodies.  We are the only ones at the pool other than an inordinately attractive pair of lifeguards.  Is this Baywatch, Sicilian-style?  We ask the female guard why there is no one else there.  She flashes a brilliant smile and shrugs. “It is the wind, and maybe a storm is coming.”  She waves in the direction of the clouds that are gathering in a corner of the sky.  She is right about the wind.  It has picked up and our umbrella is shaking, edge flipping up and down above us.  The wind is perfect – keeping us cool as it evaporates the water from our bodies.  I walk up to the bar and order a limonata, a refreshing lime drink, to share with Nick.  I comment on the lifeguard/bar keep’s tattoo – an interesting Asian design with a date underneath.  In a mixture of Italian and English he introduces himself as Robert Clark: he is so ultimately Sicilian looking and sounding that his name seems truly out of place, but I don’t feel like I should ask.  He explains that he runs the town’s Bushido School (we have seen the signs as we have walked through Cianciana) and was World Jiu-jitsu champion on the date beneath his tattoo.  I am suitably impressed and congratulate him.  It certainly explains his god-like physique. 

Nick and I lay in the sun for a lovely, relaxing hour with the pleasant sound of the flapping of the umbrella and the occasional shadow drifting past as clouds slowly continue to gather in the mountains lulling us to sleep.  The female lifeguard has left, returned with her 8-year-old daughter (my god!  How could that figure have produced a child?) and then left again.  Two other men have joined Robert Clark and the three sit at a table, sipping from cold bottles of beer and playing cards.  Not one other patron has entered the pool.  This is a perfect afternoon.