Ortygia

Jo arrived in Sicily a couple of days ago. Vivian is at camp in Slumber Falls learning to be a better Christian, along with her cousin Ava. Evan is hanging out with his cousins at his Aunt Nicolle's. From the pictures we are seeing, they'll both be disappointed when we return to Austin.

Jo and I spent a lovely evening wandering around Palermo eating and drinking. Next morning we drove for three hours over bridges and through tunnels across the heart of Sicily to the lovely historic town of Ortygia - a tiny island town connected to the city of Siracusa or Syracuse by a couple of bridges.

When we checked in to our hotel, our receptionist came out and inspected the rental and declared that it was too low and too wide to be accommodated in their garage - which surprised us a bit considering we are talking about a Fiat 124 Spider. She somehow got her six foot self into the car and found street parking for it. When Jo and I later walked past the only public garage in town we understood what she meant. The car would have bottomed out entering and leaving the garage and the average streets of Ortygia are slightly narrower than when I spread my arms. So we walked.

Jo and I liked the open air church. We also visited the main cathedral - an amazing structure built in the seventh century. It incorporates an even older Greek Temple of Athena from the fifth century B.C - you can see the original doric columns both inside and outside the cathedral. And archeologists have found that the greeks built on pre-Hellenic foundations. So people have been praying to different gods right here for a few thousand years. I hope it worked out for them. Outside, in the plaza, a lady in a black dress had arranged six portable LED lights around her in the evening darkness and was dancing a tango with an umbrella in her arms. Keeping Ortigia weird.

Beside the cathedral was another smaller church (one of many hundreds around the town) that is home to a Caravaggio - The Burial of St. Lucy. St Lucy is the parton saint of the city and some of her remains are at the cathedral. We walked in and I stared at the huge painting hung over the alter for as long as I could without being rude to Jo- we aren't museum compatible :-)

Besides churches, Ortygia is very serious about gelato. And they too have auto rickshaws - beautifully painted and trimmed in wood with cabriolet tops.

While St Lucy is famous, there is another even older and probably better known citizen of Ortygia - Archimedes - of the "Eureka!" fame. When I was a nerdy kid (as opposed to a nerdy adult) and learned about the principle of density it was a huge aha moment. Archimedes invented a screw pump (a variant of which which Uncle Tom uses to load grain into a silo to this day), discovered hundreds of geometric relationships, and successfully defended Siracusa from the Romans multiple times using his catapult, the Archimedes claw and heat rays. Eventually he was killed by a Roman soldier. He requested that a cylinder and a circle be placed in his tomb. Good man. Below is the Fontana di Diana in the middle of the Piazza Archemede.

Which brings us to yet another Ortygia-related celebrity (TMZ of thence would have been in a tizzy). Diana is the Roman version of Artemis - the original feminist, hunter, goddess of wild animals, a cool person all around, daughter of Leto and Zeus, and twin sister of Apollo. She born in Ortygia according to legend. As it turns out, her attendant Zoe Nightshade (according to Rick Riordian) is Vivian's alter ego. Small world.

We loved our short couple of days in Ortygia. The island town was ancient and sublime and peaceful and gentle and beautiful and we'll miss it. Tomorrow onwards to the Aeolian island.

Palermo

Palermo is a jewel - founded almost three thousand years ago by the Phoenicians and subsequently ruled by the Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Normans, roughly in that order. It was briefly the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. Patton raced to capture it during WWII.

Today Palermo is a bustling grimy city filled with architectural wonders, graffiti, traffic, restaurants, markets, dog poop, and churches. It's somewhere between Hyderabad and Europe and I feel very much at home. There are crumbling derelict buildings next to lovingly maintained plazas, roof top restaurants, food to die for, and street markets that remind me of visits to Monda Market on Sunday mornings with my dad. And there are even rickshaws ("autos" in Hyderabadi).

By the time Jo arrived I had been to Palermo twice in the last ten days. I took her for lunch to a restaurant and the owner greeted us like long lost friends. To make things a bit weirder, his kitchen help was Bangladeshi - who chatted with me in Bengali. Can't wait to show this city to Vivian and Evan - I feel like I almost know how to make my way around.

Stromboli

Stromboli is one of Italy's (and Europe's) few active volcanoes. We sailed into the harbor on the north side of the island one afternoon and by 5:30pm we were dressed in hiking boots and armed with a guide and helmets to begin our 3000 foot climb to the summit so we could peer into the active crater. We could hear Stromboli thundering above us every few minutes.

As we climbed we had fantastic views of the island and the sea. In the photo where I'm looking back down, our boat is one of the white specs at the extreme right of the picture.

Once we got to the steeper switchbacks we ran into other groups who had slowed down higher up. There were probably a hundred people climbing that night. We sat around the crater and enjoyed Strobmoli's frequent and "mildly explosive" eruptions. The term "Strombolian eruption" is used to describe continuous but mild eruptions like this. Stromboli has been doing it every few minutes for a couple of thousand years, though every now and then there's a bigger one that results in the more garden type of volcanic destruction. After watching the volcano throw glowing rocks a few hundred feet up in the air from a half a dozen vents for about an hour (the last eruption was considerably more powerful and scared the crap out of us), we shuffled down an ash field and reached the bottom just before midnight. 

A couple of websites that track volcanic activity worldwide had some nice photos from the evening we were there, with a note that volcanic activity in Stromboli is increasing (though it is still within the normal range : ). The guy who took this photo could have been sitting next to me and photographing without a zoom - it's what I saw happening a few hundred feet from the end of my boots.

Several times during the evening we wondered what prompts somewhat sane people to clamber up a steep hill to peer into an erupting volcano. No good answers here. But it was easily the highlight of my sailing trip in the Aeolian islands. From Stromboli we sailed to the island of Vulcano where we hiked up yet another volcano - though this one only leaks steamy gases. Then we walked back down to the beach and waded into a pool of hot bubbling sulfurous mud where the ladies from our boats started a trend by replacing their bikini tops with dollops of steaming mud.

Strange fact - I have visited both Snæfellsjökull in Iceland and Stromboli here - the fictional entry and exit points in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

Sailing

I've never sailed in the Med before so it was a blast to skipper a 51 foot beauty around Tyrrhenian Sea and the Aeolian islands for a week. My crew of seven were good or willing sailors from whom I learned a lot and they were also a heap of fun, though our sister boat out drank us easily by an order of magnitude.

We visited the islands of Lipari, Panarea, Basiluzzo, Stromboli, Salina, Filicudi, and Vulcano. I ate some seriously good Aeolian food and a lot of raw swordfish and tuna, drank more than my fill of local wine, and swam in the amazingly blue waters of the Mediterranean sea. 

At the end of the day I learned that there are places that I'd never heard of till last week that will knock my socks off.

Next time I'm in these parts I hope it's in a cat and with Jo, Vivian and Evan.