Italy: The Unexpected in Catania (plus a day on Mount Etna)

We knew little positive about Catania before stopping here for three nights in the last week of June 2018. Historically, it's been one disaster after another: its residents deported or enslaved by Greek tyrants, the city occupied by Carthaginians, plague in the Middle Ages, lava flows from Mount Etna in the 1600s, followed by an earthquake, then falling into crime and urban decay. Yet, today, it's a surprisingly pleasant city to visit that seems younger than its years, possibly due to the number  of university students in school here.

The video, above (I apologize for its abruptness, but this blog platform can't accommodate large video files), shows one of the many delights we stumbled upon here. On a Monday evening walk after dinner through the softly dark streets of the historic district, we came upon someone playing tango music from a portable sound system in the cathedral plaza. And, amazingly to us, people had come to tango. We assume this is a more or less regular thing as many of the dancers seemed acquainted with each other, though they were not necessarily dancing with their romantic partners.  People changed partners when one or the other wanted to sit on the edge of the fountain to rest.

The surprises, however, began even before we reached Catania. On the drive from Taormina, we wanted to stop in at one of the small towns en route. Our first choice was Acireale, but after driving around a bit without finding a legal place to park, we headed to the next town, Aci Castello, where we explored the ruins of a seaside fortress and gazed out on the Riviera dei Ciclopi, marked with gigantic rocks that the Cyclops threw at Odysseus as he fled after blinding and tricking the Cyclops. Who knew this stuff is as real as rocks that you can see with your own eyes! Or don't you believe Homer?

Our inn in Catania, B&B Sciara Larmisi, was easy to find. Again, our inn occupied just one floor of a large building, but that floor included a very nice outdoor terrace where we had breakfast. Our innkeeper helped us find a guided tour to Mount Etna, which we had been counting on. It's possible to approach Etna from the north, using Taormina as a base, but there are more lava flows, craters and ash heaps on the southern side, so we chose to go from Catania, which is southeast of the volcano (and well within the danger zone).

The rest of our time here was spent wandering the city (we even took a tour on one of those for-goobers-only tourist trains), exploring its fish market and the huge Villa Bellini park, and enjoying its robust passeggiata on the pedestrian-only Via Etnea.

In the distance are the rocks that the Cyclops
supposedly threw at Odysseus as he escaped. This
is the view from the fortress at Aci Castello.

Spiderman seems right at home on the wall
of a palace in Catania.

A zoom lens created this compressed view of Via Garibaldi, looking west to the
 black-and-white Garibaldi Gate, which is well outside the city's historic center.

This is the view from one of our balconies in Catania. The
little gray and black Citroën C3 at lower left was our rental;
it brought us here from Naples and eventually
took us to Palermo. This is Piazza Cutelli.

The view east from another balcony. This looks down
Via Vittorio Emanuele II toward the Piazza dei Martiri and
the Ionian Sea.

This photo looks the other way on Vittorio Emanule II,
west toward the historic central district.

We walked to the Garibaldi Gate. In the distance you can see the dome
of Catania's Duomo or cathedral.

This elephant is being squished by the clock
atop the Garibaldi Gate. The dark
stone is lava, which is used in many
ways throughout Catania.

A still photo from the tango session featured in the video at the start
of this post. The building in the background is the Duomo.

All this food accompanied aperitivos at
a sidewalk cafe on Via Etnea. What look
like meatballs are fried balls of rice. Most
places give snacks of some sort with
cocktails, but this was excessive.

The park Villa Bellini provides acres of gardens, promenades and fountains
near the center of Catania.

Signs on the southern
slope of Mount Etna.

Mounds of ash attest to geothermal
activity not too far underground
at Mount Etna, which is perhaps
best thought of as a huge mound
of craters and vents, not a
cone-shaped volcano.

Desolation left by eruptions decades ago. 

Lichen are the first plants to grow on lava flows,
and they begin the process of breaking down the rock
and leavening it with organic matter. Other plants
come much later.

Different colors reflect different eruptions. These hikers
are dwarfed by Etna's size, and this is just a tiny bit
of the volcano.

One of hundreds of craters scattered around Etna. When Etna erupts,
its force is seldom diverted to old craters, meaning that
new ones are created each time.

The entrance to a lava tube, which was formed by
a stream of moving lava beneath a hardened
surface. The lava drained out, leaving a
pipe-like formation. This tube was about
a kilometer long.

Inside the tube, the only light comes
from headlamps. The floor was very
rough, sharp and irregular. If you tripped,
you'd probably receive a nasty gash.

Striations on the walls indicate there
were more than one lava flow through
this tube.

Italy: Mountains and Sea at Taormina

The gondola (Funivia per Taormina Mare) from Taormina's central district to
the beaches below passes over an athletic field on its way down the mountain.

We arrived in Sicily a little after 10 on a Friday morning on the ferry from Villa San Giovanni to Messina.  Since we were in Messina and the timing was right, we wanted to see one of Messina's most popular sights, the Duomo's bell tower clock striking noon. It took a while to find a parking spot and then to figure out how to buy the parking slip to put on the dashboard, but we made it to the Duomo piazza in plenty of time.

The clock tower isn't some artifact from medieval times. It was built in 1933, but its technology seems much earlier. At noon, counterweights, gears and levers move and animate gilded bronze statues in the facade that have religious significance (a lion standing and roaring seems a symbol of a strong Christian faith, for example, or maybe of the resilience of the city) or relate to traditions specific to Messina. It lasts about 15 minutes and drew a couple hundred spectators on the day we were there. (For more on the tower, click HERE.)

As soon as the clock show was over, we left Messina on the coastal road south to Taormina, a medieval mountainside town on the Ionian Sea northeast of Mount Etna.  It's almost totally a tourist town, and for good reason. It has excellent restaurants, a gondola to take people down the mountain to beautiful beaches, rugged buses to take people up the mountain to even more scenic Castelmola, and a raft of hotels with sea and mountain views. It reminded me of Capri.

We stayed at a tiny inn, the Maison d'Art Casa Arico. We were using GPS on our smartphone to reach the inn when it told us to turn into a covered alley that was about a meter wide. We couldn't park nearby, so we kept driving thinking we could find a way to reach the other end of that alley, but we ended up parking on the other side of town and calling the hotel. One of the innkeepers came to us on a motorcycle and had us follow him through a maze of narrow streets and turns so tight that I had to reverse our small car to navigate them. When we got to the inn, on a tiny residential street, there was no place to park, but that wasn't a problem. The inn had someone come and take our car away as soon as we got the luggage out. The car reappeared three days later when it was time to leave.

Messina's Duomo is a typical southern Italian
cathedral, which is to say that it is magnificent,
but it's the campanile or bell tower
that steals the show with its
intriguing clock.

The lion is just a few minutes away from
moving up and down and roaring.

Biblical scenes are depicted in this revolving element.

This is the view from our hotel balcony
in Taormina. Though most hotels are either
near the beaches or in the commercial district,
ours was tucked away on a quiet residential street.

Jane adds the tonic to our afternoon G&Ts
on our hotel's roof terrace. That's the
Ionian Sea in the distance.

The little almost-island at right is Isola Bella, a destination
for sunbathers who want to get away from the crowded
beaches.

A lido at Mazzaro, Taormina's most popular beach.
Our hotel provided us with towels and a beach bag, we
rented shaded lounges here, ate lunch at the
snack bar, and had a very nice day. It was one
of the best swimming spots we visited in Italy.

The central piazza in Castelmolo, a small town high above
Taormina, which is visible in the distance. The main
attraction is the remains of a mountain fortress.

Tourists stroll the narrow
streets of Castelmola

"Cucina Tipica Siciliana" appears on many restaurant signs. It advertises typical
Sicilian cooking. Here it's rather badly translated. I wonder how many visitors
to my city of San Diego would want to eat at "Typical California Restaurant." 

This bronze in Taormina's beautiful Villa Comunale
park, is by Piero Guidi and is called "Angeli del
Nostro Tempo" or "Angels in Our Time."

Century-old follies, structures with no function other than to delight the eye,
at Villa Comunale park.

Corso Umberto I is the main shopping street in Taormina.
Most of the good restaurants are on smaller streets. The weekend
we were there coincided with a book fair sponsored by Jaguar.
Jaguar's electric  E-Pace SUVs drove fair VIPs
 very slowly through these crowded streets.
Only one English-language work was sold at the fair,
a child's folding book about ancient Greek gods. We
bought it for our granddaughter.

Italy: Maratea and the End of the Mainland

A lido at Fiumicello, near Maratea. The beach was pebbly but not uncomfortable
for bare feet. We encountered no other Americans here and, indeed, almost
all the other tourists we saw appeared to be Italians. At the top of the mountain
in the distance is a colossal statue of Christ facing east with his arms raised.

In our trip to Italy, after six weeks in Rome, we spent a night in Naples, took the ferry to Capri, came back to the mainland to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum, then crossed the peninsula to Trani. From there it was south along the Adriatic to Alberobello and eventually to Lecce, a detour into the heel of Italy's boot. We had to backtrack a bit north to reach Matera, the cave city, and then it was  south-southwest toward Maratea, a beach resort area on the Tyrrhenian Sea. We had two nights here and then a night at Villa San Giovanni on the Strait of Messina. After that, we'd put the car on a ferry for the short hop to Sicily.

It may sound rushed, but it wasn't. We had only two one-night stops; the others were three or four. We had planned our itinerary to give us short drives with plenty of time for breakfast before reaching our next destination in time for lunch. In many places, once we arrived, we didn't get back into the car until it was time to leave, so we got in a lot of steps, according to my Fit watch. A typical day might be breakfast, go out to museums, churches or other sightseeing, have lunch, sightsee some more, back to the room in the hottest part of the afternoon, then back out again for aperitivos and dinner, which in Italy is eaten around 9.

In the midst of this grueling schedule, we  saw Maratea as a chance to relax. It's actually several communities strung along Basilicata's very short Tyrrhenian coastline (between Campania to the north and Calabria to the south). First, the ancient town of Maratea, which is a bit inland and which we did not visit. Then there are the oceanfront communities of Marina de Maratea, Porto and Fiumicello. You could also toss in two Campania towns: the fishing village of Cersuta and the lidos of Acquafredda, both a bit north along the coast.  We stayed at Hotel Villa delle Meraviglie (House of Wonders) near Fiumicello. It has a nice large swimming pool as well as long and steep flights of steps down to a rocky and forbidding shore. When we arrived, we had a very late lunch at the pool's snack bar.  We enjoyed one of the nearby beaches, we liked the bars and restaurants of Porto, and basically we recharged after almost compulsive sight-seeing at our previous stops.

The shore at our hotel. The weather was overcast during much of time in Maratea.

The pool at Hotel Villa delle Meraviglie. The
white building is the hotel.

 

We saw trees shaped like this all over southern
Italy. I think this one at Porto is a
chinaberry tree.

Buildings step down the steep hillside
to the harbor at Porto.

Our rental car, a 2018 Citroën C3, had
its own view outside our lodgings, Blu
Infinito,  a tiny modernist inn high
above the town of Villa San Giovanni,
 about a three-hour drive from Maratea.
(The car, by the way, was fun to drive
and its incredibly tight turning radius
got me out of trouble a lot on narrow
streets.)

The pool is the source for the inn's name,
Blu Infinito. It overlooks the Strait of Messina.
That land in the distance is the northeast
corner of Sicily. 

Sunset over the
Strait of Messina, which
connects the
Tyrrhenian and
Ionian Seas. That's
Sicily in the distance.

Trucks wait for the ferry to Sicily at
Villa San Giovanni on the tip of the
Italian mainland known as Punta Pezzo. 

One of the ferries that shuttle cars, trucks and people between Messina on
Siciliy and Villa San Giovanni on the mainland. The crossing takes about 30 minutes.

Aboard the ferry, passengers watch as the mainland
gets smaller and smaller. Next stop: Sicily.

Italy, Matera, the Cave City

What look like conventional buildings line the canyon's edge at Matera. The facades we
see actually are mere fronts added to cave entrances. The caves have been carved from
the soft limestone and used as homes and even churches for centuries. Today,
some contain luxury hotels and restaurants.

Basilicata  can be thought of as the instep of Italy's boot. Its recorded history begins when the great city-states of Greece started colonies here that quickly amassed wealth and military power. That, however, was a peak, and by the 20th century, Basilicata was so poor that, according to Carlo Levi's book "Christ Stopped at Eboli," the region had "been bypassed by Christianity, by morality, by history itself -- that they have somehow been excluded from the full human experience."

Things are looking up a bit these days. Matera, the unique city at the northeast corner of the region, will be the European Cultural Capital for 2019, which brings infrastructure improvements, attention and, most of all, tourists and their euros, to this city of caves. The rest of Basilicata, parched hills and valleys along the Tyrrhenian Sea and bordering Puglia, Campania and Calabria, continues to look somewhat neglected.  The government hasn't even put in tollbooths on the highways, so here you drive free while in other parts of the country there are frequent tolls.

We stayed only two nights in Matera. We met other tourists at our cave hotel who were staying four and five nights, using it as a base for exploring along the Adriatic Coast of Puglia, just to the north.  As it was, we had the afternoon we arrived and the entire next day to explore the town's winding and steep streets and its most unusual churches. Basically, there is a "new" town on the edge of a ravine or canyon.  The caves, called Sassi, are essentially carved into the walls of the canyon and usually fronted with facades that resemble those of conventional buildings. The streets, which may have once been goat paths, are narrow and steep. You can drive into the old town, but a valet will whisk your car away once you've gotten your luggage out. Just turning around on these streets is an effort.

In the early part of the 20th century, the cave part of town fell into disrepute, with many of the houses abandoned or used as squats. The businesses still here were brothels and bars. Today, it's home to a range of more or less modern hotels and inns, restaurants and other businesses catering to tourists, and to people who are rehabbing the Sassi to use once again as homes.

Inside, other than the lack of windows, you might not know you're in a cave as they are often lined with stone work that keeps the native limestone from sending flakes raining down on you. Though some caves can be rustic, others are quite fantastic. It's hard to beat Dedalo (click HERE), an excellent fine-dining restaurant a few steps from our inn, Il Palazotto Residence and Winery. Its curving and interlocking rooms still show the stone they were carved from. Its website takes a moment to load, but it's well worth a look. Unfortunately, I didn't take a camera to dinner when we ate there.

Our room at Il Palazzotto was
in a cave lined with stonework.

Barrel vaults gave our hotel room something
like the feel of a cathedral's crypt.

Upon this Rock: Matera's Duomo or cathedral
is at the edge of the Matera canyon. The other side
overlooks much of the old town.

The cathedral's interior gives no hint that it's in Italy's poorest province or that Matera
for centuries was a backwater ignored by the rest of Italy.

San Pietro Caveoso is near the southern end
of the cave district, known as Sasso Caveoso.

At San Pietro Caveoso, parts of centuries-old
murals have survived centuries of neglect.

This rock contains two churches or chapels, Madonna de Idris and San Giovanni in Monterrone,
created in the 14th and 15th centuries. The latter resembles an anteroom to
the larger  (but still small) Madonna de Idris.

The remains of 17th-century paintings are visible in Madonna de Idris. 

Repairs to the floor and electric lights are the only modern touches at Madonna de Idris.
It was used on special religious feast days into the 1940s.

Matera cascades in a tangle of narrow, twisting streets.

Steps are essential on Matera's narrow, steeep streets.

A small child gets a lift going up one of Matera's many stairways toward the Duomo.

Unused caves on the other side of Matera's canyon
 give some idea of what Matera itself once looked like.

Hikers along the rim on the other side of Matera's
canyon. They had great views of the town.

A passerby in need must have
annotated this always-welcome
sign, which was on a street
at the edge of the Sassi district.