Under the Sicilian Sun

Ahh Sicily..

As I mentioned in a few of my last posts, I had the amazing opportunity to spend a long weekend in Sicily!

Italy and Sweden both had a holiday on Tuesday May 1st, so I was able to juggle around holiday time and such to make it work that I could go on a 3-4 days trip planned by one of my coworkers in Milan. She had invited me weeks before, but with the Swedish factor, I wasn’t sure until days before if I would be able to go.

Our flight was at 2pm on Saturday, so my plan was to get to my apartment Friday night, go to bed, wake up, do laundry and a few other errands, then meet them at the airport around 1230pm.

• Made it to my apartment (late, and riding shotgun in an Italian shuttlebus but..) - check

• Talked to Matt (bonus!) - check

• Went to bed - check

• Woke up - check

But after I woke up I started to get off track haha.

I decided I had PLENTY of time and took a relaxing morning, drinking coffee and organizing receipts for my Sweden expense reports, listening to some awesome tunes, and debating which bathing suit to bring to Sicily. I finally headed towards the laundromat around… maybe 930? I of course got sidetracked but a street market that I didn’t even know existed! I was in desperate need of some sunglasses since I had so intelligently forgotten to pack any from the states back in March. Luckily, I found some! Two cheap pair for 8 euros. I’ll take it!

I kept walking towards my actual destination, then got sidetracked again by a pharmacy, because I ALSO was in desperate need of some sunscreen hah. I purposefully hadn’t brought that, but I knew this weekend would be the first real time I would need some.

P.S.- sunscreen is expensive here

So I finally make it to the laundromat, do my laundry (it takes an extra cycle to dry of course) and at that point realize I need to RUN back to my apartment because I am going to be late. I power walk back like a mall walker at her best, and rush around to shower, pack, and get to the train station. I get there about 15 minutes later than I said I would, but when it came to it, it didn’t really matter. The other American girl that was coming on the trip, Sarah, and I took the same shuttle I had taken the night before back to the Milan Linate airport.

We get through security and such with relatively little struggle or drama. But.. I meet the group and panic just a little- I thought there just were 4 of us going.. Me, Sarah, Italian host girl Cinzia, and another coworker Laura. I get there and there are 7 of us, and the Laura is not my coworker Laura but another friend. In my head I was worried that this meant the whole weekend was going to be a repeat of the night I went out with an Italian coworker and his friends in March- Just a bunch of people talking in italian around me, and occasionally switching to English to translate.

One of the guys was Cinzia’s boyfriend Allessandro (Alle for short), and the other 2 folks were a couple that were Cinzia’s friends and that just HAPPENED to be going to Sicily on the same flight to go see their parents. So it ended up 5 of us, AND all 3 Italians in our group spoke incredible English. Alle and Laura actually finished some of their graduate and medical schooling in the US.

Anyway. We arrive at the Trapani airport on the west side of Sicily, the couple goes their separate way, and the 5 of us get picked up by Cinzia’s mom and aunt. Most of the road to their house is right along the water. I loved it. She lives in an area near Trapani called PizzoLungo. It is named this for the tall rock peak that stands alone in a small field next door- Pizzo essentially means ‘peak’ and lungo means ‘long’.

Her mother’s house is GORGEOUS. We park on the street and walk in the gate- the front patio area has a small rock garden with chairs, and I think a little pond. You walk in and the floors are all marble (I think), and there is this beautiful staircase winding up on your left, or a door straight ahead. Both lead to apartment-type spaces. If you walk through the door to the bottom apartment, you walk into a big living room space that is also used as a dining room at least on occasion, you then walk into another small sitting space where there was this AWESOME painting but I don’t think I got a picture of it, then the part of the kitchen with the kitchen table sits and a door to another patio where the dog hangs out. His name is Billy and he apparently hates everyone. Then the kitchen itself.

Upstairs you walk into a similar living space with a door to the side patio, then walk down the hall where there are two bathrooms on your left, two bedrooms on your right, and a bedroom straight ahead. Apparently when Cinzia was growing up, they shared the house with her grandparents so her grandparents lived downstairs and her family lived upstairs. When her grandparents passed away, her mom moved downstairs and reconfigured the upstairs a bit to allow her to rent it out in the summers to passing tourists and visitors. From the living space in the upstairs, there was a spiral staircase leading up to the roof. So. Wonderful.

After we settled in just a bit, picked rooms, dropped our bags etc., we went downstairs and obviously had a piece of a homemade pastry her mom had made and espresso. Obviously.

Then, I knew we were in good hands when Cinzia IMMEDIATELY started discussing what we would go see THAT night (it was about 530pm or so already) and then what we would save for tomorrow etc. Before I knew it, we were grabbing our bags and headed back to the car to go to Erice… the medieval town on a hill near Trapani. So we drive a little into town, but then instead of driving all the way, we park and take a cable car up the mountain!!

The view from the lift was spectacular.

And here is where I got my first taste of Alle’s knowledge of history (or at least his ability to make up history... Though I am not necessarily back-checking the stories he told ;-) ). He grew up near Milan but still knew a decent amount about Sicily. He explained how the city used to be named Drepana from the Greek word for “sickle” due to the shape of it’s little peninsula.

Another fun story is that there is a small, narrow island that looks like a submarine coming up (I actually saw it and thought it was a submarine), and apparently in WWII it kept getting bombed because airplanes ALSO thought it was a submarine that just wouldn't go down hahah.

He also explains how Erice, the town we are headed towards, was known as a place of fertility as the Elymians had erected a temple dedicated to love and fertility. People would apparently travel here far and wide when they wanted to get pregnant. The twist is, that they would go to the town and essentially attend an orgy and surprise! Come away pregnant hahaha. Even outside of the Elymians, the Greeks and Romans also worshipped Aphrodite and Venus in this town. A castle was built by the Normans, and still stands, where the old temple apparently used to be. I actually continually found out that all of Sicily is really seen as a place of fertility… not just human fertility, but fertile grounds. Kind of neat.

Anyway, most of the places were closed by that time, so we couldn’t go in the castle or any of the churches, but we spent a couple of hours wandering and taking in the city.

A classic pastry of the area is called the Genovesi (I think after the grape… but there were no grapes so I don’t quite get that). It is custard-filled deliciousness dusted in powdered sugar, and we had to have one before we left. We went to a pasticcerie where their genovesi… maybe all their pastries actually.. Are made by nuns in a nearby convent :-) We then topped off our pastry-filled bellies with ‘amaro’ which is one of the many after-dinner digestif liqueur drinks that Italians have to offer.

We head back down to the cable car, and we just so happen to take the cable car back down the mountain RIGHT at sunset, though the picture I tried to take through the glass didn’t turn out so… not pictured.

By the time we got back to the house, it was pretty much dinner time. Cinzia’s aunt came over as well as 3 of her mom’s friends to join all of us for dinner (so all in all the dinner table included 8 Italians and 2 Americans). What an amazing experience. I truly could not understand most of the conversation ha, but I sat and had a 4 course meal prepared by a real Italian momma while drinking champagne and white wine and of course… more amaro. We had olives, bread, and a salami of some sort as an appetizer, couscous with a fish broth for first plate, swordfish for second plate, and then pineapple and strawberries for dessert. So. Good. And in between every meal, everyone took a smoke break hahaha. I loved it.

After dinner, the 5 of us headed into Trapani. Although it is a small city, and apparently the lesser known and lesser visited city on the west side of Sicily as compared to Palermo or the beach city of San Vito, their nightlife was HOPPIN! Seriously. The streets were packed. We wandered through town for a bit and then settled into some outdoor seating at a bar for one cocktail. It was a little bit chilly, and I was exhausted, so around midnight I hit my point of, “bed now???” I think we left the bar around 1230 or so and were in bed by 1am.

We left right around 9am Sunday morning to stop at a ‘bar’ (they call the places where they stop for a coffee and a brioche a bar) and then head to Selinunte!! Selinunte is one of a few archaeological sites on the island. It was about an hour drive and COMPLETELY worth it. Oh my gosh. Guys. It was so cool. We met one of Cinzia’s old friend’s mom (Pino, short for Fillipino I think) who is an actual tour guide for some of these sites, and she gave us a detailed tour at no extra cost. She gave us SO many amazing facts, but I doubt I remember them all. Let’s see here:

• Greek ruins from before the Roman era, but the island of Sicily has apparently been inhabited since the paleolithic era

• Most of the temples in Selinunte are OLDER than the Parthenon having been originally built around 600 BC

• They only reconstructed a single “complete” temple and a few pieces of a few others, but then decided they wanted to leave the others “as they found them” so they are still in piles (likely fell during an earthquake), but you can very clearly see pieces of columns or where the base of a column stood etc.

• One of the temples (in a pile) is one of the largest found from the Greek world though it was never completed; it is estimated to have been about 100m long, 50m wide, and 30m tall which is just a freaking engineering marvel

• The city changed hands many times through war etc.

• The city acropolis lies in an area between two rivers which is why it is believed to have been chosen- strategic location + fertile grounds (there you go with that fertility again)

• This is one of the few places that have no restrictions on where you go… so you can actually ENTER the temple and climb on the rocks and column pieces

• The pieces for the columns really required skill to design because they were required to be cut out of the quarry in their cylindrical shape with a slight slope to allow the columns to be slightly wider at the bottom than they were at the top (by maybe a foot or so). So when slaves etc. were sent to carve the stone out of the rock quarry, they had to know exactly which piece they were cutting out so they knew what diameters to use to meet the design.

This was the top head of a column.......

Class 3 scramble! (High five, Matt)

Me generally geeking out...

After we finished out 3 hour tour of the ruins, Pino left and we drove a few minutes down the road to have lunch at a place right on the water overlooking the sea. I had some AMAZING pasta and enjoyed chugging some water.

After lunch we took the long drive back towards Trapani but stopped a bit short and went to a vineyard for a scheduled wine tasting!!

We were at a vineyard called Baglio Soria, and they took us into this private room with the sommelier Luca who talked about and gave us samples of 6 different wines. Most of the wines were really interesting and kind of different. One of the wines comes from their vineyard on the eastern side of Sicily by Mount Etna which is an active volcano, so the soil is full of ash and smoke and the grapes take on that smokeyness which was supppeeer unique. We had fun with it and definitely needed a bit of time afterwards to drink some water and rest before getting into the car haha. We also continued to joke the rest of the weekend that everything had a “hint of licorice.”

After the vineyard we went to the Salt Works of Trapani where they.. Harvest?.. Sea salt! It was actually very interesting. And smelly. But we got a brief tour of the small museum and our guide was the granddaughter of a man who owned the.. Farm?.. Early in the 1900’s. They talked about the equipment used and improvements in worker safety and such. It was neat! And then we got to walk through the salt basins at sunset and it was absolutely beautiful.

We topped off our night getting pizza in Trapani with 4 more of Cinzia’s friends from growing up. Again, everyone is always very nice, but..man it is rough being an english speaker surrounded by Italians. It wasn’t awful, but there were a number of moments where say, one girl was telling a story.. All 7 italians are captivated, and at the end of the story they all laugh appropriately. Sarah and I kind of sit there and smile, and I keep thinking

“Please don’t try to explain it.. Just leave it.. Don’t explain it.. I don’t need to feel like the idiot Ameri.. Oh there he goes”

So Alle would then take over, retell the whole story in English and the punchline would just be SO anti-climatic because everyone else was sitting there listening too… for the second time… and it just wasn’t funny. Having to explain a joke to someone is awkward and ruins said joke in any country.

P.S.- Italians can DOWN some pizza.

But when we left I got double cheek kisses from everyone and that still makes me feel special haha. Apparently it is mostly Sicilians that really do that and even folks from Milan see it as… emotional and archaic haha. Oh well.

Sunday morning we took a little more time in the morning to shower and get ourselves moving before we headed out once more to grab a brioche and cappuccino at a bar and then off to the Nature Reserve! Again, SO beautiful and SO amazing. Truly. We had talked about it earlier as “you have to walk a way to get to a beach spot,” but I did not expect the adventure we got. It was a true trail that you hike along the side of a mountain ridge looking down on the clear blue water. It was another moment where I think I had a smile on my face for about 2 hours straight.

We hiked to a cave where there were supposedly prehistoric cave paintings or petroglyphs or something. You couldn’t hike INTO the cave or anything, and we couldn’t find any prehistoric images, but it was still pretty impressive. We went to the beach down at the base of the mountain near the cave and spent 2 hours relaxing on the pebbles. We stuck our toes into the water, but it was still VERY cold, so none of us actually went in. While lying down, soaking in the sun, a butterfly landed on my FACE! I am gonna say that’s good luck. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Around 3pm we hiked back to the car, bought waters off a man in little stand, and then headed back to the house to get cleaned up. We made a side stop into San Vito for granita! Granita is essentially REAL Italian ice ha. It was like a fancy and delicious thick slushie that you eat with a spoon and they put whip cream on top. I got coffee flavored and everyone else got pistachio flavored.

Oh and it's served with bread... because obviously.

If you have never spent most of your day hiking, I cannot explain how perfect ice cream or something similar is in that moment. You are tired but satisfied, you smell, you’re hungry, but you are energized. You are feeling closer to nature and the wind and the sun. So I am in this mindset sitting outside having this granita, watching all of the beach goers pass by, and THEN.. a guy walks by playing an accordian.. And before I can even finish the thought, Cinzia says, “What a perfect Italian moment.” You took the words right out of my mouth :-)

So we finally head back to the house. Cinzia had told us that the two friends from the airport had invited us to have dinner with them, but even she admitted that she wasn’t really sure what to expect as far as number of people or who the people would be.

We all shower, change, make ourselves look presentable, and head out. We pull up to this MASSIVE house with a private gate and a patio the size of another house. We are told it was Elio’s (not sure on the spelling) parents’ house. Goodness. We walk in, and it turns out to be almost entirely family members of Elio and his fiance… I can’t remember her name. Maybe Veronica. Apparently they very recently got engaged and this was the first time the parents had gotten together since the announcement, so this was an engagement party of sorts. And we were there. Ha. I laughed pretty good at that one. Two of the friends from the pizza place the night before also came, and we spent the night talking and eating and drinking. I had (one half of) my first REAL cannoli… and it was the size of my arm.

And of course more amaro. I swear even the 80 year olds were up drinking and talking until about midnight.

We finally went back to Cinzia’s house around 1am, I talked to Matt for a couple of hours to catch him up on my weekend, and then woke up to fresh coffee and brioche in the upstairs kitchen. I finished gathering my stuff but had to head out after that to catch an 1130 flight back to Stockholm. I had offered to take the bus etc., but they offered to have Cinzia’s aunt take me to the airport instead because I was flying out of Palermo and she worked in Palermo anyway. So obviously I graciously agreed. It was not until I was getting into the car that I realized she spoke very little english. Like. Very little. So. We tried to make chit chat for a few minutes, and then both decided to just remain silent. Luckily about 20-30 minutes in she decided to put on the radio so it wasn’t COMPLETE silence the whole way. I am absolutely not complaining, though. This wonderful woman saved me a bunch of stress and time in getting the airport, so.. She can do what she wants haha.

Without much else in way of eventful moments, I make it back to Stockholm by dinner and enjoy not getting into the hotel after midnight.

What a fantastic weekend.

See you soon!