Sicily - part four

As the climate changes, Sicily’s torrid summers are even more torrid (with consequent wildfires) and this autumn seemed warmer - often very warm - than past visits. Still, shoulder season with hat and water allowed for unjostled time to quietly appreciate treasures I’d not previously seen. 

Segesta is a marvel. 

Tucked in a remote valley not far from the Tyrrhenian Sea, just one temple (420 BCE), but never finished, so no marbles to transfer to the British Museum. And definitely not as busy as the Parthenon. One person stands below a massive column. 

Segesta’s 3rd Century BCE theatre has a backdrop, which, to this day, competes with plays for audience appreciation.

On the other side of Sicily is the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento. A World Heritage site, much different than the last heritage site I visited, isolated and foggy, Newfoundland’s Viking L’Anse aux Meadows.

https://trainsandboatsandplanesandtheoddbus.blogspot.com/2023/06/newfoundland-and-labrador-part-three.html

On a hill above the Mediterranean, seven temples were built during the 6th and 5th centuries BCE. These are among the largest and best-preserved ancient Greek buildings outside Greece.

The Temple of Concordia was later turned into a basilica but saved when Christian elements were removed in the 1780s.

At the Temple of Heracles ... 

... from an English class sixty or so years ago, the last lines of ‘Ozymandias’ come to mind:

‘"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away’.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)

Siracusa or Syracuse has the 5th Century BCE Teatro Greco. Of all the theatres and amphitheatres I’ve seen on Sicily, this may be most inspiring. 

According to my 1966 guide, ‘It’s probable Aeschylus saw his plays The Persians and The Women of Aetna given in this magnificent setting, where the Syracusans would also have seen works by Sophocles, Euripides and other famous Greek playwrights’. 

Aeschylus’s The Women of Aetna (Etna)(or possibly the Nymphs of Mount Etna) is a lost tragedy written in Sicily around 476 BC. The play celebrated the founding of the city of Aetna after a volcanic eruption.

And what’s classical history without Homer? In Aci Trezza, the Cyclops Polyphemus, who lived on Mount Etna and was blinded by Odysseus … 

… is found not far from the boulders he threw as the wily hero escaped.

Sorry, this is false news from millennia ago. The boulders are lava (basalt), prosaically described in my guide to Etna as ‘intrusions of magma’. 

Myth or not, I prefer the Polyphemus in Palermo’s wonderful puppet museum.

Sicily - part three

A selection of Sicilian scenes and subjects that caught my attention, but unlikely to be used in the following posts. Again, if you want to skip the text, but quickly check the pictures, click on this first photo and scroll through.

Sampling the wares in a Palermo market.

Dodging scooters in the same crowded market.

The Piaggio APE 50 (first with a cab came out in 1964) continues to be made.

Here’s one in the style of a traditional Sicilian cart, a carretto.

The carts, often with depictions of medieval knights and warfare (this from a display in Marsala) …

… were once seen frequently as in these postcards.

A rather forlorn cart I came on in Siracusa …

… and super snazzy Vespa version in Taormina.

More knights in Palermo’s puppet museum …

… and a street market.

Sicily’s scenery … in the west Monte Cofano …

... and on the island of Mozia also in the west …

… a hilltop village in the east …

… and coast near Mazzarò.

Belle Époque bathhouse in Mondello ...

... and early evening on the promenade in Mazara del Vallo.

From a hillside in Taormina, I spotted a terrace …

… where the Kaiser (far left) and his retinue breakfasted in 1904.

The Kaiser later rented the entire hotel for a month in 1906. Edward VII and Queen Alexandra also came that year. Another early 20th Century visitor was Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II.

While eating they had a view (presumably minus aerials and satellite dish) of Mount Etna.

A circus I'm devastated to have missed ... FRIMER AQUATIC CIRCUS PRESENTS THE ELECTRIC WOMAN INCREDIBLE BUT TRULY UNIQUE IN THE WORLD.

And finally, I prefer this shot in black & white as it’s somehow more evocative, sort of Cinema Paradiso-ish … movie posters and a backstreet in Mazara del Vallo.

Sicily - part two

'Without Sicily, Italy cannot be fully understood. It is here one finds the key to all things.’ Goethe (1786)

Even on this, my longest visit to Sicily, I can't claim but the most superficial understanding of the island. However, I can claim hundreds of pictures whittled down in hopes of a digestible few posts. 

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I arrived armed with my usual, splendidly useful, out-of-date travel guides, including the 1943 "Soldier's Guide to Sicily'. This was issued to invading Allied forces, among them 26,000 Canadians.

The soldier’s guide tells me:

‘Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, Vandals, Goths, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Germans, French, Neapolitans, and the Italians have ruled the island. It makes for a complicated mix and history.’

And according to Penelope Turing’s 1966 Your Guide to Sicily (21 shillings) … 

… ’There is splendour in the sunlit towns, and squalor too, wealth and poverty, faith and sorrow’. 

Hmmmm ... I find a café and people watch with mid-morning coffee and croissant or, on Sicily, cornetto. I particularly enjoy off-season when places are reasonably quiet.

For a start, here's a collection of those, some unwittingly, who have made my Sicily trips so enjoyable, including book lovers (bookstores still thrive on Sicily), a chanced on modelling session, welcoming friendly cat and young lovers understandably oblivious to all but themselves. Remember you can click on a picture and simply scroll through. 

In Mazara del Vallo I was delighted with a father showing his son how to skip stones. A scene, if ever there was one, calculated to induce nostalgia. 

Perhaps, as a friend suggested, he's reacting to a football score!

In fashionable Taormina's busy Piazza IX Aprile (with a Garibaldi connection, if you care to look it up), passersby, including myself, gawked at a professional photographer, assistant and model.

And finally, a lady who, without my asking, turned and so kindly posed in front of this mural depicting neighbourhood goings-on.