SavocaWeb

03-21-05 Savoca (June 3)

Seeing my name on every street sign and manhole cover perhaps gave me a false sense of celebrity – I owned this town.

Granted, there wasn’t much to own. Most of the buildings were empty, boarded up, rotting, inhabited only by pidgeons and dust. Dad and I mused briefly over the real estate possibilities of a place like this, but having to farm for my own food is not on my list of specialties or desires.

The one establishment that brought any life at all to the town was the Bar Vitelli, famous for its role in The Godfather as the place where Michael meets Apollonia’s father. After we mentioned our last name to Maria D’Arrigo, the bar’s proprietor since before Pacino sat on her porch, she handed us a postcard and offered to sell us paper-thin t-shirts proclaiming her as Mama del Mundo (mother of the world). Of course, as they listed the name of the village, we couldn’t resist. Ahh, the only thing worse than a tourist is a tourist who’s a sucker for gimmicks.

03-21-05 Taormina (June 2-3)

Mountainous. Sicily thrusts up out of the Med magestically, rising hundreds of feet right at the shoreline. The taxi drivers love this, as the hotels, views, and sightseeing are all perched on the cliffs, while the beaches and sunbathing require descending on the roads that double back on each other over and over down to the sea.

As Sicily rises from the sea, so does Etna from its surrounding land. The volcano, steaming and smoldering, can be seen from almost everywhere in Sicily, as it is at least twice as high as anything else on the island.

06-21-04 – The Strait of Messina (June 2)

The next morning, we hopped on a train bound for Messina. in our cabin sata family from Calabria. The balding father always looked about very nervously. His wife spent most of the train ride staring into a mirror and applying, removing, and reapplying massive amounts of makeup. Their son, about my age, passed the time snoring loudly into my ear – his halitosis was unbearable.

Dad and I had tried to imagine how we were to cross the water between mainland Italy and Sicily. Was there a bridge across the entire strait? Do we leave the train and get on a ferry? As we approached the Strait of Messina, the train stopped and waited for about a half hour. It then backed up slowly into a huge ship. The ship held the entire train, broken up into four tracks side by side. I was grateful to get on deck and away from our travel companions. A half hour later, we descended back into the bowels of the ship and the train continued on through Messina and to Taormina. We were in Sicily.

06-20-04 – Persistence of Memory

With the regret of a child leaving its mother, I boarded the plane and left Rome. True, having secured a job at Renfro Design Group in New York City, I had plenty to look forward to, but on the lonely journey across the ocean, I experienced a homesickness for the wrong country. I was hesitant to return to a world of luxury, where all food was always in season, where the people pride themselves on the size of their automobiles, where you didn’t have to check your wallet before ordering another glass of water. I longed for the inefficiency, for the ancient buildings in decay, for the mysterious (but now more decipherable) language, for the portions that left you with just enough room for a gelato.

Granted, New York is probably one of the most “European” city in America, but looking around at the SUVs and the commercialism and the excess, it also feels very much like one of the most “American” cities as well. And now here I sit in my apartment across the street from DAAP in Cincinnati, and I have quite a bit to tell. So here are my final diary entries detailing my trip down to Sicily with my father at the end of one of the most fantastic times of my life.

In Closing

I started my travelogue with a reflection in the mirror of a motorini. I think it’s only appropriate to end with one. “Ciao, Roma.”

L’Osteria Dal Martino

Ortigia, Peninsula of Siracusa

06-06-04 – Capri, Round 2 (May 30 – June 1)

Capri’s vengeful seafood had robbed me of my weekend. This time around, I was determined to make up for lost time. Of course, in Capri, that generally implies lying about on the beach, eating overpriced food, and buying worthless knicknacks. How Hubert Schneider, a New Yorker we met, could spend six days on Capri I could not fathom. Maybe he was documenting the entire island using his peculiar 3D camera, an ancient device with two lenses and a special contraption for viewing prints. We parted with a friendly handshake under the Faro (lighthouse) that watched over sunbathers avoiding tan lines.

Perhaps by expecting a perfect vacation, I was disillusioned when I did not find it. The waiters seemed more pushy, the tourists more numerous, the residents more snooty, and the sea somehow less blue. I began to see how the islanders ran things, charging €10 for cappucino and a pair of stale mini-pizzas, and cutting fellow natives huge deals while complaining under their breath about the besky throngs of tourists.

Of course, my negativity could not possibly persist with such pulchritude everywhere. The weather, of course, was perfect thanks to Dad’s unbeatable travel karma (the high pressure front moving through didn’t hurt either). The food, overall, was quite good. Despite my previous experiences, we even at at Il Cucciolo again – another tasty dinner, washed down with a bottle of Classico Chianti and a discount thanks to Abby’s borrowed copy of Let’s Go Italy.

Aside from taking in the sun and emptying out the pocketbook, I also made it back to the Grotta Azzurra, and saw the Axel Munthe museum. Still, there’s not too much to see on the island; we were happy to hop the ferry to Sorrento.

Ortigia Duomo at Dusk

Temple of Concorde, Agrigento