BOX 146: Sicily, Part 1.

These are the ruins of a Greek theater built in the 200s BC and modified by the Romans. The gaping hole in the skene ("scene," in front of which productions were performed) shows the Sicilian town of Taormina, with Mount Etna in the background. It was the first stop on a clockwise drive around the island undertaken by Max, Janet and me in early summer 1983.

As I mentioned in my last post, we crossed by ferry from Reggio di Calabria to Messina. Since that Sicilian town was pretty much destroyed by a 1908 earthquake and rebuilt after, there was less to attract tourists compared to quite a few other cities in Sicily. I did have a personal interest in Messina: I thought that my grandparents on my father's side, who arrived in the U.S. around the turn of the 20th Century, had come from there, or nearby. One of my aunts had visited relatives in the 1950s, and I started wondering if I should try to look up some cousins. I did look in the Messina phone book and saw eight Milicias listed; but we had not budgeted time for a stay in Messina, and decided to move on to Taormina. (We'd have to return to Messina anyhow to cross back to the mainland.)

Built on hills above the sea, not far south from Messina, Taormina turned out to be a town primarily catering to upscale tourists. Besides a number of luxury hotels there were especially well-groomed public gardens and pavilions:

From those gardens there were spectacular views of Mount Etna to the south, crowned with steam or fumes:

Near sunset I took one photo of a bit of the Old Town:

The next morning we visited the Ancient Theater shown at the top of this post. I took a second shot that shows the nearby sea:

But these are the only photos I took of Taormina. Our next stop was Catania, pretty much at the foot of Mount Etna. Though an ancient city, its later heyday was the baroque era, to judge by its spectacular architecture, including the Cathedral:

(As I mentioned in an earlier post, Italian buildings that looked grimy in 1983 have been cleaned up, as you can see if you visit Catania Cathedral on Google Street Views.) The Cathedral is on a grand square that includes an elephant fountain that is the symbol of the city, here seen from the doorway of a government building:

I'm not sure just where the next photo was taken, only that the handsome building was built in 1779:

Catania has its own Roman theater, the ruins now tucked in amid more modern buildings:

Later that afternoon we continued farther south to Siracusa (Syracuse), where we spent the night. Once a major Greek settlement, Siracusa is rich in history, exemplified by its Cathedral, which has columns from a Greek temple visibly embedded in one of its walls. The facade is Sicilian baroque. I took two photos trying to frame it (hard in a narrow piazza without a wide-angle lens):

The Piazza Duomo is far from square, more like a |), flat on one side and curved on the other, but narrow. In this next photo the Cathedral is on the left, the church of Santa Lucia in the back middle:

Handsome buildings line every side of the piazza. The restaurant in the next photo faced the cathedral facade:

And in one more shot, taken the next morning, the restaurant is in the middle, the Cathedral on the right:

Google Street View reveals that the piazza, like so many in European city centers in recent decades, is now pedestrian only. I highly recommend you visit the square, partly to see how gleaming white it now is, including the travertine pavement. But you won't see a horse and cart, like the one we saw on a nearby side street:

The historic center of Siracusa is on a peninsula extending into the sea; here is part of the shoreline at evening:

There are also important sites a bit farther from the city center. The next day we visited the legendary Fountain of Arathusa, a spring or pond now with papyrus and ducks:

We also visited an ancient quarry, where one hollowed-out space is called the Ear of Dionysus:

From Siracusa we headed inland in a southwesterly direction, toward Agrigento on the south coast. The Sicilian countryside beyond Siracusa was beautiful as we wound through it on a narrow highway:

I took the following photo of the entrance to a farmhouse just because it looked the way I had imagined a Sicilian farm might look:

Along the drive we came to the city of Noto, a spectacular assemblage of Sicilian Baroque architecture from the 1700s, the old city having been destroyed by the same 1693 earthquake that had devastated Catania. Here is the Cathedral, or as much of it as I could get into the frame:

Here's another view, showing less of the facade but some of the grand staircase:

Another church:

Here are two more shots looking upward at other impressive examples of Sicilian Baroque. (The first shows part of the San Domenico Church.)

And here are two balconies with very fancy stonework, attached to a nobleman's palace:

The lunch we had, on a side street before I took the Noto photos, was plainer than the architecture: our first course was spaghetti and meatballs with a tomato sauce, closer to "home cooking" in the States than anything we had eaten on the whole trip through Italy thus far.

The road from Noto wound through low mountains, with lots of switchbacks and stunning scenery. It took us past the town of Ragusa, where I wish we had had time to stop and explore:

At one point we were stopped by a herd of sheep on the road, the first time this had happened to me since driving through the Scottish Highlands:

We got to Agrigento just in time to stop at the Valley (actually a hill) of the Temples just outside the modern town. The light was changing rapidly as we arrived at the Temple of Heracles:

The Temple of Concord, the most complete of the ruins, was under scaffolding:

Looking beyond the ruins, we saw a pretty fine sunset:

And here are the last photos I was able to take that evening, of the Hera Temple:

Here is the same temple the next morning, when we revisited the site, plus a wider view of part of the grounds:

My only other memory of Agrigento is of spending some time on a beach near our hotel. From there we went on to explore other parts of Sicily, as I'll report in the next post.