Sicily, Still

Looking out past the Valley of the Temples (which is, inexplicably, a ridge.) 

Part two on our time in Sicily! Find the first part here. 

With our time in Palermo over, we rented a car and the four of us headed south, into the countryside. Driving in Sicily was not difficult; once we got out of the big city the traffic disappeared. There were no turnpikes (freeways, highways) along our route, just a meandering two-lane road. Sometimes pretty meandering, but rarely in bad shape. Biggest frustration: speed limits too low! We were poking along at speeds much slower than the road would support, especially with no other cars in sight. I suspect that local authorities dealt with speeding on the road by repeatedly lowing the speed limit. When we did encounter locals on the road, usually they were passing us… like we were standing still!

Really? A speed limit of 50 KPH, 30 MPH, on a fine road like this?!

Our first stop was the Valley of the Temples, near the modern city of…

Agrigento

Sicily, we were told, has better Greek ruins than Greece. Yeah? Could be. We’re not experts, so we’ll go with the travel pundits on this one. Agrigento was a major ancient city, founded around 580 BCE and populated with Greeks from colonies further east in Sicily.

The modern city is rather extensive, but what interested us were the ruins.

Tempio di Giunone, the Temple of Juno (aka Temple of Heracles), at the western end of the Valley of the Temples. Considered to be the oldest temple, from the 6th C BCE.

Tempio della Concordia, or Temple of Concordia. The names in the Valley are speculative: this temple is named for an agreement reached in a modern meeting room near the temple.

Another view of the Temple of Juno (or whatever!) Regardless of the name, these pillars have been standing for a very long time.

New life springing from old: a century plant sends up its bloom amidst ancient ruins.

The statue of a heroic angel—a modern art work—with the Temple of the Concordia.
Paula's photo.

A telemone, or atlas, from the Temple of Zeus. It stands 25 feet tall, and there were perhaps a dozen of them holding the massive roof of the temple. This one is in the museum at the Valley of the Temples. Note the relative size of the baby grand piano.

Alan contemplates the past while leaning on a decaying telemone. This statue once helped hold up the roof of the massive Temple of Zeus, which is now completely destroyed.

A final view of a ruins as we make our way out of the Valley of the Temples.

Villa Romana

It seems that as the Roman Empire began to wind down, at least one über-rich merchant decided to get out of town, and set up shop somewhere really out of the way: near the center of the Sicilian isle. Our rich merchant, who apparently dealt in exotic wild animals from Africa, built himself an enormous enclave, lavishly decorated with mosaic floors.

Entryway into the villa.

entrance hallway. It is felt that the exotic animals depicted in these mosaics served as a sort of catalog for this presumed merchant of wild animals.

Sicily is well situated for trade between Rome and Africa. Rome relied on Africa for grain, and also exotic animals. The animals were displayed, then sent to the arena to kill and be killed in battles with armed gladiators and unarmed condemned prisoners.

These scenes from the main hallway, showing the capture of wild and exotic animals, support the idea that the owner dealt in these animals.

It seems the villa was buried by a landslide sometime around 1100, not to be discovered again until 1929. The mosaic floors are extensive (over 35,000 square feet) and well preserved, thanks to the landslide. It is now a… yup, UNESCO World Heritage site.

One of the more stunning mosaics: women athletes in competition. The woman in the robe at the far left holds a crown for the winner.

After leaving the Villa Romana del Casale we visited a few small towns on the way to our lodgings that night. Sicily is quite mountainous, and some towns are as much vertical as horizontal.

This extensive staircase was built in the 19th Century to better link the upper and lower parts of Caltagirone.
We preferred to stay in the lower part...

Clever street art in the town of Ragusa. Yeah - that kid (statue) is doing what you think he's doing.

Palm Sunday celebrations at Duomo di San Giorgio, Ragusa's cathedral.

Our time in Sicily is just about up. We spent a total of 10 days there and hiked through more towns than I can remember. It was an overview, so we didn’t stay in any place very long. But from what we saw, we will definitely return!

Except maybe not Catania. We spent our last night there because it has the other major airport on Sicily, and we had an early flight out. The city seemed… I don’t know, disorganized. We did have a  good time wandering around the historical downtown area. That was fun. But driving, not so fun. That was the disorganized part. The roads were bad, and driving across town felt uncertain.

Paula had insisted we check the car return at the airport the day before, and good thing, too. It had taken nearly an hour just to figure out what was what in the bright light of day. It seems there are very many car rental agencies - over 30 different ones, and several return areas.

The place we stayed that night in Catania has the distinction of being the most charmless lodging we’ve ever had: it was newly-refurbished with bare white walls and minimal—and boring—furniture. We were glad to leave the next morning, at 5AM, but driving through the city in the dark was strange. At least there was no traffic… except for the noisy Vespas that shot past us. And when we arrived at the airport we were ever so glad we'd checked out the rental return the day before: we never would have found it in the dark!

 

Mt. Etna seen from the top of the boarding ramp, just before getting on the plane; Catana Airport.

And today, the 25th of May, we hear Mt. Etna erupted, shutting down the Catana Airport! Glad that didn't happen while we were there... although we could have been. Ya never know what will happen when you travel.

It’s been a long trip so far: from the red rock canyons of Petra and the open desert of Wadi Rum, through Bible country and the Dead Sea to the many towns and sites, current and past, of Sicily. But we’re not done. Next up: the perennial romanticism of Sorrento and the Amalfi coast, with a brief stop in the Eternal City, Rome.

A mosaic from Villa Romana depicting Ulysses serving a cup of wine go Polypheus, the Cyclops, who held Ulysses and his men captive; an illustration of a tale from Homer's epic "Odyssey."

Finally, Italy! Er, Sicily!

 

Early morning view from our terrace in Palermo.

This is the fourth episode in the series of our trip to Jordan and Italy. Find the first here, and the second, about Petra, here. The blog on Wadi Rum is here.

Is Sicily part of Italy? Legally, yes, although I’m not sure all Sicilians think so. (Nor all Italians, for that matter!) But as tourists, these questions do not concern us. The important thing is, we were there!

It was a sort of a long and winding road to Palermo, Sicily, starting from Amman, Jordan. As we mentioned in this blog here, we flew out of Amman at 3AM, to Athens, Greece. Then we flew to Rome (the one in Italy), after which we took a final flight to Palermo. For reasons I don’t understand, at every stop we needed to clear customs to get on the next plane. (For those unfamiliar with international travel, generally while transiting—changing planes in one country on the way to another—passengers are kept in a special, controlled-access lounge, eliminating the need to go through the unpleasant and occasional down right annoying security process.)

So anyway, three security checks in one day, plus waiting in airport lounges, made us very glad to arrive at our final destination, the airport in Palermo. Which then required a half-hour bus ride to the city.

But that part was not unpleasant. We eagerly stared out the bus windows to the Tyrrhenian Sea (as that part of the Mediterranean is called) as we moved toward the city. The next puzzle, of course, was figuring out the local transportation to get from where the bus left us to our rented apartment. We could take a taxi—and often do—but there is a certain satisfaction to figuring out and using the local system.

Our terrace in Palermo. That figure on the wall—three bent legs with a woman's face in the center—is called the Trinacria and is the symbol of Sicily... because of the three corners of the island? No one seems to know!

We were soon in our apartment, and it was more than satisfactory. Three light bright bedrooms, a huge terrace overlooking the city, and located in the interesting (which is to say, older) part of Palermo.

The Trinacria we bought as a souvenir of Sicily. Yes, the lady has a moustache. Why?
No one seems to know!

As we said above, Sicily is legally part of Italy, but it has its own history which goes ‘way back. Lots of settlements came and went, including Phoenician and Carthaginian, Greek, Roman, Vandal and Ostrogoth, Byzantine Greek, Aghlabid, Fatimid, Kalbid, Norman, Aragonese and Spanish (and thanks to Wikipedia for that list). I don’t even recognize half of those names!

Anyway, The Phoenicians were there in the 11^th century BCE, followed by (sooner or later) the Greeks.

In fact, the Greeks really took to Sicily, and it became an important part of Magna Graecia (greater Greece, referring to the Greek colonies on and around the Italian peninsula). Today the most extensive and best preserved Greek ruins are in Sicily (which, of course, we visited!)

Suffice to say, there is no end of interesting things to visit—and think about—in Sicily.

 

          Palermo

We liked Palermo, the capital and most important city. There was a feeling of dark decay coming from neglect, but the street art—graffiti—showed a robust art culture. Sure, places were run down and maybe not so appealing, but people went about their business with an energy. We got the impression that this state of affairs, these dark streets and torn-up buildings, was considered just temporary, soon to be gone. Never mind that it’s been that way since WWII, at least!

A market in Palermo. As expected, everything is incredibly fresh and crisp!

We share Second Breakfast in Palermo's Piazzo Caracciolo, toasting our arrival with Mimosas and arancini, deep-fried rice ball filled with cheese or meat.
(Paula's photo!)

Street art: A wary looking shark on a roll-up door.

A grocer sets out his vegetables in Palermo.

Apartments on a side street in Palermo.

More street art.

There's plenty of churches in Palermo (it's Italy, after all!), but this one we found particularly interesting, with Moorish domes: the 12th Century Chiesa de San Cataldo, seen from Piazza Bellini.

Teatro Massino, Italy's largest opera house

Fontana Pretoria, known as the Fountain of Shame, exposing more body parts than most; the nuns in the nearby convent used to sneak over at night and chisel bits off the statues.

And finally, a nod to the excellent—and often surprising—food we found in Palermo:

Paula and Sue exclaim over a pizza with sweet, yellow Datterini tomatoes (and mounds of soft creamy burrata mozzarella!)

Monreale

The Norman Kings of Sicily chose this small town in the hills above Palermo for their hunting resort, and in 1174 built a church. The town's real claim to fame—and the church's—are the extensive Byzantine glass mosaics that cover the interior, done by both local and Venetian masters in the 12^th and 13^th Centuries.

We took a day trip to Monreale (there’s a local bus that does the hard part of climbing the steep hill). We were stunned: the entire church interior is covered in gold glass tile mosaics! And, many of the decorations contain Moorish themes.

Like many churches, the Caterdrale di Monreale has a cloister. But this one...

has every pillar decorated in with mosaic tiles in a unique pattern!

Norman, Byzantine, Arabic… what a blending of diverse cultures!

Above the altar, Caterdrale di Monreale 

Part of one wall, covered in gold glass tiles.

It's easy to see the Moorish influence in these examples of vertical trim.

It should come as no surprise that the mosaics represent biblical tales.

This was just our first few days, in Palermo. We saw much more of Sicily...

(…and we’ll tell those tales in the next blog)

Looking from Monreale out across Palermo to the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Wadi Rum Desert Preserve

 

A Bedouin guide leads camels through the desert.

This is the third episode in the series of our trip to Jordan and Italy. Find the first here, and the second, about Petra, here.

After our rather excessive second day at Petra (21,000 steps! 3,700 vertical feet!) we slept well, and were met at our hotel the next morning by our driver, Hamdan, ready to take us two hours down the road to Wadi Rum, a desert preserve.

One advantage of having a driver was his ability to call and coordinate with the folks at our destination, making our arrival seamless. We got out of Hamdan’s car, and into the truck from the camp we’d booked. (I’ve mentioned before the incredible amount of planning that Paula and her long-time friend, Sue, put into this trip. The driving, the lodging, the excursions had all been set up months before.)

Our cabin. The dome behind is larger, for families.

Pathway through the camp.

We studied the desert from our seats in the back of the truck: it was orange. Well, mostly; also yellow. And endless. Our driver, taking us to the camp, mentioned that scenes from the movie The Martian were filmed here; also Dune and numerous other desert-based films.

Wadi Rum Desert Preserve--orange and empty.

Our camp, the Wadi Rum Dream Camp, is one of many in this area, which offer varying levels of comfort. Wisely, the camps are well spaced, preserving the sense of desert vastness. At our Dream Camp we had individual huts, with en suite bathrooms (our first experience with glamping!). One whole wall was a huge window giving out on the desert: perhaps that’s the dream, the sense of being engulfed by the vastness without having to actually put up with the heat (we had AC!) and blowing sand (tightly-sealed windows!).

(Actually, the weather was extraordinary, neither hot nor cold, and certainly not windy. We had perfect desert exploration weather.)

Sue, welcoming us to the camp.

One of the Bedouin staff relaxes in the seating area. There's a large pot of tea on the fire all day long.

There is nothing, really, to do in the desert (for those of us lucky enough to be staying in a dream camp) except experience it, which is, of course, the whole point. In fact, Wadi Rum is a protected area, somewhat like a National Park in the US: nothing happens there without a permit. The hikers, the camps, the camels. The desert rides; all are tightly controlled to prevent the place from becoming overrun.

Paul, lost in the desert landscape.

In our case, much of the experience came from two long trips we took, one each day we were there, riding in the back of the truck.

Tire tracks running through the sand.

I have mixed feeling about those desert rides. Certainly, streaming through the desert in the back of a fossil-fueled pickup (a new Toyota HiLux, the model commonly used by the camps) did not fit in with my romantic notion of a vast, quiet, ethereal desert.

Most common mans of transport. But only tourists ride the camels!

Sue hangs on as we speed past tourists and their Bedouin guide.

On the other hand, we could not have walked very far! Camels were certainly available for hire, and probably horses, but frankly, we would have gotten even less far that way. We did see some hikers far from any camps, and I admire and envy them their desert experience, which no doubt was more “authentic” than ours. But I’m also pleased that we were able to see the variety of landscapes that we did.

A Bedouin tent in the desert.

Much of what we saw was unique and fantastic; some felt a bit “old hat.” Our first stop was at the “mushroom rock,” a huge bolder balanced on a tiny pedestal. It was swarming with other visitors as we drove up, people on another truck tour just like ours. Eventually they left and we took our photos, but hey, we’ve seen rocks before. We also visited some impressive rock arches, but again, we’ve been to southern Utah several times, including that US National Park called, er, Arches.

A rock arch.

More rock; another arch.

This crowd climbed on top of the arch, and insisted that each person have their photo taken there. 
(Note the Bedouin tent: you won't see that at Arches NP!)

At one point we stopped at the top of a steep dune and waited while several other trucks made the big drop. After our apprehension reached the appropriate level, it was our turn, and down we went. It was, admittedly, thrilling, although I didn’t really want it to be. (How “authentic” was THAT experience?)

A truck, ready to take the Big Drop...

That could be our truck, but it wasn't...

See, we’d come to experience the immense emptiness and solitude of the desert; bouncing along in our little pickup gave us that, while at the same time destroying that same emptiness and solitude. That was the conundrum of Wadi Rum!

 

...because this was our truck!

There was a clever end to the afternoon “sunset tour.” As the ride wore on, and the sun got lower, I began to think, yes I want to see the sunset in the desert, but really have no interest in riding back in the dark! Ah, but the tour ended at the perfect place to see the sunset: right outside our camp. Our driver encouraged us to remove our shoes and walk barefoot the brief distance to the camp, which I did. It was quite nice, and I realized I could have walked quite far (barefoot or fully shod) while watching the sunset. But none of us did; we were perfectly content to watch the skies darken from right in front of the camp. So… opportunity missed? Maybe. But we were exceptionally well satisfied with our desert experience just as it was.

 

Returning to camp at sunset. It was just March, and flowers were blooming!

The camp at night (no, those are LEDs on the hill, not fires!)

Paula got this exceptional night shot of the camp with her iPhone 14.
 That's Jupiter just below the moon!

Then the morning came when we piled into the truck with our bags, and returned to the parking lot where Hamdan awaited. We were going north, but he headed south, to clear a long mountainous ridge. We went as far as the outskirts of the city of Aqaba, at the top of the Red Sea, and then got on the highway heading north. We followed the Jordan-Israel boarder for almost four hours—desert all the way!—to the Dead Sea and our luxury resort. And, a few days later, the Amman airport and the flight to Palermo, Sicily. But we told that story in a previous blog, here…

Morning, the day we left, seen from our bed through the huge picture window..

Well, that's the end of the Jordan stories. Our next stop was in Palermo, Sicily...

Sunset in the desert, the night before we left.

10-May-2023