We have made it to Sicily! We took a train and ferry from Calabria and I mean we took a train onto the ferry. It was pretty cool. It was like a regular ferry boat but had no cars. Only trains. Our train split in half and the train cars that were going to North to Palermo went on one side of the ferry. And our ferry going down the East coast went on the other.
The first thing you see on the East side of Sicily is Mt. Etna. It steamed the whole time we were there and I think it is always steaming. A little unnerving but I guess I live in the shadow of several volcanos in Washington and don’t think anything of it…
Catania is the biggest town on the East side of the Island with 300k people. Big enough to have an active downtown and some great public squares and churches. It is November now but there were still a lot of people around- especially on the day when a cruise ship came in…
We had been looking forward to the Sicilian food and our Airbnb was in the heart of the food scene. We were right above the “umbrella” street which had a lot of busy restaurants, cheese vendors, and produce stands. The fish market was just a block away and we could smell that too from our balcony. We had our first cannoli here and we will be trying at least one in every Sicilian town we get to… The first night we also had octopus that was coated with pistachio and chopped up popcorn. It sounded to weird that we had to try and it was fantastic.
On Nov 1st we had decided to go to the WW2 Allied Invasion museum. But when we left the house that morning, people were everywhere… There was a parade going down the main street. It was All Saints Day (the day after Halloween) and all the kids were out of school. The subway was closed and so was the museum so we just spent the day wandering around town. We found the remains of another Roman amphitheater. We have seen a lot of these now.. and this only was in pretty bad shape.
The next day we finally made it to the WW2 museum, it is always interesting seeing wars portrayed from a different country’s perspective. We were surprised to see Mussolini shown as the bad guy that caused them to Sicily get smashed by the Americans and British in just 39 days in 1942. I didn’t take any pics but it was a really well done museum, even though a lot was in Italian.
After the museum, it was still before noon so we decided to take a train to the nearby town of Aci Castello to see there castle perched on some volcanic rock over the see. We often stay in the big tourist towns so sometime it is nice to get out and see come regular Italian towns. This one was pretty nice and we had a good lunch there.
The weather has been great at around 75 and sunny every day and might get up to 80 this week. Another great visit but we are ready to move on. Next stop is the ancient city of Syracusa at the South East tip of the Island of Sicily.