Saturday, October 30, 2004

ESPECIALLY FOR SICILY TRAVELERS

The months are flying by, and April (or June) will be here before you know it. So here is a brief glimpse of the place you will be staying at in Sicily, your home away-from-home, in Sciacca, Agrigento province.
Briefly, there are 72 vacation units in this complex, but we are the only ones who live here year round. The structures are less than 15 years old, new enough to not have major problems, old enough to get the kinks worked out. Picture 1 is an overview of where your apartments are located, the row of apartments that is on the top level of this three level complex. They are owned now by one owner, a corporation made up of two brothers, quite young guys who inherited them from their dad when he died and who own other apartments in other Sicilian cities. They seem to know what they are doing, and the younger one, Domenico, has a degree in botany. I did not take a picture of his mom’s garden because someone was there, but it is incredible. They are also US citizens and speak English.
Pictures 2 and 3 are of some of the apartments. We do not know for sure which ones you will be staying in because they will assign them as the time gets closer. But they are all very well cared for with lovely gardens. Picture 4 is the view of the bay from your terrace, and picture 5 is the view from our terrace here on the first level. It is not always sunny here-this is of a spring storm and the waves are higher than normal. Picture 6 is the nearby complex in which the brothers also own apartments. They are smaller and nice too, and it is possible that you will be staying here, but I imagine we will all be in this complex since that is what we asked for.
Picture 7 shows the port of Sciacca and 8, the view from the top of the town (from the green swath in the center) looking toward our bay. You can see the big communication towers (toward the top right of the picture). The tallest one is above and between our two apartment complexes pictured here. Picture 9 shows our bay in summer and the small boats that are here for several months. Picture 10 shows one set of stairs on the far side of the complex and the fence that keeps the sheep out when they come to graze here. Picture 11 shows part of the stairs that go down to the beach and picture 12 is the beach in full summer. The apartment complex rises behind the hillside with the communication tower in the background. The last view is a long view from the road of the whole complex.
As the time comes closer to your trip, I will put together some pictures of the places you will be seeing when you are here. See you all soon!

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

OCTOBER HOUSE CLEANING

We leave in less than a week for 17 days in the states, so I am cleaning up the last minute items to do. While I work on these things, I am also trying to keep up with the house cleaning, of which I have written about before (probably too much). And I have had certain revelations on this ever important task.
It seems to me one of the biggest reasons for keeping a spotlessly clean house here is to keep the vermin down. You may laugh at this, but in a place where the dry summer leads to a damp fall, where spiders, flying insects (fruit flies, wasps, mosquitoes, and huge beetles right now), ants, millipedes and their foot-challenged relatives, centipedes, are way too numerous anyway, it makes sense to keep things cleaned up so as not to attract more. And so it is a battle against nature at all times, ESPECIALLY since I am always bringing flowers and fruits and nuts into the house! In short, I clean up bugs all the time.
Out in nature, my very favorite insect is the leaf cutter ant. They just look so gay! They are very numerous here; they line up in rows coming and going, waving their cargo gaily over their heads, and I always imagine they are on a way to a party. I wasted quite a lot of time the other morning taking pictures of them and following them to their nest. Then I tried to get into that with a stick, but they have this nasty habit of finding me, climbing up on my body, and biting! So I usually just watch. I also took some great scenery pictures then too, while I was wasting time that I could have spent cleaning the house-you get the picture. And yes, here are the pictures, as well as some from rides this week.
One of the other important “housekeeping” tasks to take care of before we returned to the US was to vote. We changed our address and voting district to my brother’s house in Dunkirk when we were home in May, so we submitted our absentee ballot info and they sent us cards saying the ballots would be mailed in early October. I got my card a week before Steve got his. Then 2 weeks ago, Steve got his ballot. I did not get mine yet! So after calling embassies, etc., we made a special trip to Palermo today to pick up an emergency ballot, which I will Fed-Ex out tomorrow. The American consulate office in Palermo is small, but official looking (not one, but TWO pictures of George on the walls). We had to give the armed guards (Italian army, not US) our passports to register to let us in. Then we had to push open an extremely heavy locked door when they buzzed us through. They said on the phone the ballot would need to be sent by courier and I thought they would send it from there, but we have to send it ourselves and fork out the $25 for Fed-Ex. Lot’s of help they were-they could not, of course, fax me the ballot either.
Oh, well, in Palermo we got to see our friend Angelo, who had torn a ligament tripping down the street, and we got to give his dad some CDs of old US music Steve had copied for him. And since they own to print and frame shops, they insisted on giving us a Van Gogh reproduction for “our wall over the sofa” as Angelo directed. Apparently he did not like OUR taste in decorating. Bizarre.
And since this is the season for it, we also stopped at a pasticceria and bought some of the lovely “frutti del Morti”, the marzipan called “Martorana” in Palermo after the name of the church where the nuns made the stuff famous. It is made of almond paste, sugar, and flour, which is the “pasta reale” (or royal paste). It comes in all kinds of shapes and colors, including especially fruits and vegetables, but we also say sandwiches and shrimp made out of the paste. They are individual works of art with gorgeous colors and attempts to look real. The other pastries weren’t bad either (yes, we had a few), and the young worker could not wait to pose for the “Americani.” This treat, along with bigger marzipan statues and figures like those shown, is bought and given to young children who are good on All Soul’s Day (I Morti) on November 2nd. But we thought bringing some to the states was a good idea. It’s kind of pricey ($18 Euros a KG, or a little less than $9 US a pound), but it is all made in traditional ways by hands in individual pastry shops.
So my house cleaning and packing resumes, and I try not to think of the cold that will greet me there. Since it is still swimming weather (outside) here, I guess I better pack a few heavy clothes too (joke).

Friday, October 22, 2004

RIDE TO TORRE SALSA-Montalegro

The weather forecast was for sirocco winds, clouds, and then rain. So Wednesday night I stayed outside reading for an extra long time just to enjoy the mild fall weather (no, I did NOT strain my eyes!). But Thursday morning-well, it was so beautiful it was like a dream, especially after the dire forecasts.
We decided to check out a few places we had heard of and go for a long Barchetta ride. A scenic ruin at Torre Salsa was a place people had told us about, so we headed toward Agrigento to the southeast. When we got there, two roads converged, and following the high road, we got to a point where we had to pay $5 Euro in order to continue. An agriturismo had taken over the road that led to the scenic section. Not knowing what the other road led to, we stopped at the gate and I took picture one below.
Retracing our steps, the low road led along the Salsa River to the WWF wetland reserve. It was just beautiful. And yes, we came into contact with wet wet lands, and after three or four close calls, we finally turned back (see picture). But before that, we came upon some interesting rock cliffs and further on, ruins that probably dated back many centuries. I say “probably” because I cannot find mention of them in any of my reference books. We got back to the crossroads again and took a path up another hill, always looking for the damn tower. But climbing that hill, the woodlands in the sunlight were like a Persian rug, they were laid out so symmetrically and perfectly. We found some quartz and marble slabs on the way down that someone had obviously dumped there, and they now sit recycled into a path in my garden among the small white rocks.
We decided to forget about the other destination, La Scala Turkea, for another day, and head into the beach at Agrigento, San Leone, for their famous fish lunch. But before Agrigento, we found some views of a familiar ruin, the new town of Montallegro that has the ruins of the old town above. The story goes that about 1500 the people decided to come down the hill to live for some reason and slowly, over a couple of centuries, abandoned the whole hillside town. Fascinating stuff.
And the fish pranza at “IL Molo” is about as amazing as you can get. For $15 Euros you get all the fish, bread, wine, and pasta that you can eat. They advertise that there are always 10 different hot and cold seafood antipasti and 3 different pastas or risottos, and it is true. We discovered this place with Jr and Jo and will never forget our delight in it the first time. It has continued to delight every other time since.
And today, Friday, dawned hot and clear again. The swimming in the Mediterranean was fantastic! I love it when the forecasters are so wrong.

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

ST STEPHANS AND THE MUSEUMS

As I said yesterday, we were on overload at the sights and sounds of Vienna. The center of the city is St Stephan’s cathedral, Stephansdom, and even that itself an overload. It is huge, and it is apparently constantly being worked on. There are school children out on the streets collecting money to fix the tower, and when we asked them why THEY had to collect the money, they stated that they got the day off from school if they would go out collecting! There are horses and carriages circling the main streets around the pedestrian square, and high end shops and souvenir junk (tourist trash at its worst!) for the many tourists that are constantly around. And as always, wonderful buildings, fountains, and sculptures all mixed in together.
The Museums are world class and we were glad to be able to do as much as we did and still have more for another trip. On Museum night, we saw the Egon Shiele landscape exhibits at the Leopold, accompanied by a string orchestra, and tried to get into the Mike Kelley exhibit at the Modern (MUMOK), but my claustrophobia kicked in when we could not get to the sixth floor exhibit without a surging mob accompanying us. We walked around the Museumsquartier complex, one of the biggest cultural complexes in the world (but that does not make it better, right?). The next day we devoted to the Kunsthisoriches (Museum of Fine Arts) picture collection in one of the finest huge Baroque buildings in our quarter. Our light lunch there was eaten in the incredible opulence of the Museum café, which was advertising their New Year’s Eve buffet. It really looked inviting.
Anyway, the Rubens collection there was so extensive we decided to skip the Albertina Museum Rubens show in the afternoon and go on to the Art Deco style Secession Museum, the renegade museum that was heavily damaged during the US bombings in WW 2. There is a Gustav Klimt frieze that had been relocated there, and it was well worth seeing, as it was these drawings that came just before his famous gold period work, The Kiss. The Secession is really close to the permanent market that was a lot of fun to walk around.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

VIENNA!

We returned last night from our spur-of-the-moment trip to the city of Vienna. One of the things about living in Europe is that it is so darn easy to do stuff like this. Last week the travel agent showed us a good deal to go to “Wien,” as they call their chilly city in central Europe, and so we left the beach for 4 days and three nights in 2 star tourist hotel.
I was surprised how comfortable, yet overwhelming this city was. At one point, I looked around me after a few hours of one over-the-top thing after another, not knowing where I was or what I was looking at, and I realized I had maxed out my sense of reality. There were before me Roman ruins in a courtyard of unbelievable opulence, after an incredible lunch in a wonderful café. Little did I know that just ahead were the Mozart ticket sellers in costume, the violin players in the courtyard that housed one of several city museums, and through this courtyard was a street leading to a huge boulevard of even more huge and opulent buildings, and then on to the huge complex of the Museumsquartier.
We hit museum night Saturday, where the museums stayed open till 1 AM for one low price. We finally wore ourselves out that day and had to take it easy the next. We actually only got to 4 museums. But we did fill two 128 MB film cards as we managed to see the main points of the city on foot and by sight seeing bus. We were able to find and ogle over the theater and market districts, buy books, CDs, duvets and spreads (and extra suit cases to return them to Italy), walk the streets for hours just looking at the Baroque and Art Deco treasures, and eat snacks and drink coffee at wonderful cafes. Our meals were as typical as we could find-wiener schnitzel, goulash, soups, stroganoffs, rich desserts, etc. I am not a beer drinker, but I liked the light German beers a lot.
Tomorrow, churches and museums. We will be doing the same kind of trip to Amsterdam in December, so stay tuned for Dutch treasures!

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

THE TWO SIMONES

Last week two hostages from Iraq, Simone Toretti and Simone Pari, were dramatically released and returned unharmed to Italy. I personally was thrilled, as for three weeks I had read about their parallel Simone existences and saw hundreds of different photos of the two 29-year old Italian girls working with children and their parents in Baghdad. They were obviously committed, driven girls. There was a wholesome intensity about them, a perceived sureness about what they were doing, and I was one of the millions who watched their live night landing at Fiumecine field in Rome.
Things have taken a few twists and turns since that exciting night. The two girls have incurred the wrath of US backers in the Italian government when they spoke their minds and asked people not to worry about them, but to worry about the innocent people being bombed and killed in Iraq everyday. That really pissed a lot of people off, especially as the girl’s plight had unified the country and every political group (including the Vatican) had rallied around their release. They further pissed people off when they said they wanted to return to Iraq as soon as possible to continue working with the people they had learned to love. And that comment was taken as ungratefulness to Italy who “had done so much for them” as one commentator said.
They were working for a group called “Un Ponte Per…”, or “A Bridge for…,” an international aid organization. They had also worked for Save the Children and other groups. The Red Cross was instrumental in helping negotiate their settlement. How helpful they were is now in question. There seems to have been a ransom paid, and a big one. Figures are ranging from 2 million to 33 million euros (a euro is now worth about $1.20). Reports are denied, and then surface again, and no one is really sure who is telling the truth. But of course this reported ransom has pissed even more people off, including our US president.
So there has been an increase in kidnappings in Baghdad since the rumors are believed by desperate and greedy people. There has also been an increase in statements by Italian families of hostages who were executed before and after the return of the Simones. They have come forward to gripe about the fact that there seems to have been two levels of hostage release negotiations. And, since this is a soccer country, it came to those terms today-that the two Simones were in the “A” league, and the two half-Italian, half-Iraqis killed yesterday were negotiated for like “B” league teams. Today the Simones were shown in an audience with the Pope (la Papa). One Simone was with her father (il papa) so she and her papa met the big Papa.
As I get drawn into the political controversies of Italy, I can see some merit in each of the different sides. Although personally I think these girls are paying an awfully big price for just trying to do what they believe in, I do get a little tired of both their smiling wholesome goodness and of people with different politics blaming them for what has happened with this ransom thing. They had no part in it and they were kidnapped in broad daylight in their place of work in a safe neighborhood. Their zeal to do good has certainly turned out bad for some unfortunate people. Maybe any super-committed individual is liable to this kind of problem.
I really feel for the moms, as I know they are wondering why these girls couldn’t be equally committed to something safe like teaching rich kids. Hey, somebody’s got to do it! As I see my own daughter trying to decide what to do with her life, I tell her not to worry if she does not have a grand passion for one thing or another, that sometimes it is ok to just sort of fall into a job. And a safe one, I hope, despite a few cuts on her finger from cutting limes for margaritas!
Finally, yesterday was my Saint’s day, a sort of second birthday, as I used to say when I taught Spanish. It is a celebration of the day of the name of the saint your name resembles. My neighbor and new friend Anna the cop called to tell me so. So for all you Franks, Francines and Francis’ and Frances’ out there, Happy Saints Day and be kind to animals, as was my namesake, Saint Francis of Assisi. Now there was one committed guy!

Saturday, October 02, 2004

A RIDE IN THE INTERIOR

We took a ride the other day with various possible routes in mind, but with an eye on the sky, as the weather was still very unsettled. We got fairly close to an old castle and tower we have seen from a distance for years outside of Ribera, and then noticed that there were really no roads that went there, so we were about as close as we would get. We ended up in an area that we had just skirted once before, but that I remember as seeming very interesting. It is south of Corleone, and it seems to be much more prosperous than other areas because the villages have many very large stone structures. But unlike the cement of most other buildings, these are cobble stones, with dark cement, so it looks almost familiar, like some New England towns dating back to the 1700’s.
The town that we spent time in was called Chiusa Sclafani, a name based on the royalty who put up many of the buildings in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was small, a few main roads and about 2,000 people. As many Italian towns, it is situated for protection on the peak of a hill, and it has way more churches than expected for its population.
While we walked around, we saw people watching us, but that is normal on a weekday morning when strangers appear in these little towns. A little old man sitting in the sun outside of his house started talking to us, and since most of it was in Sicilian dialect, I did not catch it all. He asked us where we were from, if we had kids, and where in the states we had lived. He went on a small diatribe against working mothers, in which I heard only the main gist of what he was saying. When I asked him if I could take his photo, he joked that we had to pay him. But when I told him that he reminded me of my 87 year old dad, he said he had 2 years on him, and that as payment for the picture, we should come to his 89th birthday party soon! We did not get the date.
Across the valley was the hill town of Giuliano, another awfully pretty town. We took a shortcut back through the back roads to the town of Sambuca, seeing many natural caves, and we got home just before it began to rain in earnest. Since then the weather has calmed down and turned very pleasant and we have even been able to swim 2 out of the last 3 days.