Photos from my trip to Sicily, July & August 2004 (Updated with NEW photos August 2005!!) These photos are pretty much all from Palermo, the big city on the North coast, and from Casteldaccia, a small town about 20 mins East of Palermo, where we stayed (I was with my boyfriend, Pietro). His parents are both from Sicily and live there from May to September almost every year, mainly because they can (they are retired architects). His mother's ancestors founded Casteldaccia and his grandmother (or great-grandmother?) grew up as kind of an aristocrat (may she/they rest in peace), and now they live in what used to be Pietro's grandmother's house. They have a large garden which extends out the back of the house and used to go on for a few blocks until the city decided to take most of it and build new schools, which separated the garden into two halves, so now to get to the other half they must go out the front door and around the block. His mother, Maria, teaches free art classes for children in their garden because they don't have anything like that in Sicily (but she tore a tendon in her knee when we were there and thus did not teach as she was on crutches the whole time; poor Maria!). And I will forever be indebted to the Sammarcos for their radiant hospitality, kindness and extravagant meals. |
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| First of all, people try to sell inflatable shit everywhere. Like on the side of the highway road... | ...in piazzas... |
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| ...and of course on the beach (this is Mondello beach). Mondello is a beach suburb of Palermo where all the richer families in Palermo have summer houses, and it's only like 10 minutes away. Everyone who works at a decent job gets August off and so the beach is packed all month long, with families spending all day there and bringing meals and keeping tables and chairs and umbrellas in their cabins. Pietro's cousins have a house in the town and a cabin on the beach. Also, there is a sincere disregard for sunblock. It is a challenge to find anything above 8spf. | These are some wild cats. Cats in italy are all stray and eat pasta. There was one kitten in Pietro's garden who eventually became tame enough to let us pick him up (this is not him). Then the day before we left we found a litter of kittens hidden under a giant aloe shrub who had just opened their eyes and were exploring their little den. |
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| This is the cathedral at Monreale, just outside of Palermo and atop a hill. This is supposed to be a perfect example of Arab-Norman architecture. It was built in the 1100's and has amazingly intricate mosaic illustrations all over the walls and ceiling. | This is some poor quality detail of the cathedral. The top mosaic is Genesis, where God (who kind of looks like he's in a wheelchair) is creating earth and the animals. Below that is Noah and his ark. |
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| Pietro and on the top of the Cathedral (I am seriously not photogenic) overlooking Palermo and the coast in the distance. You can pay a euro to go through this passage that takes you up through where all the nuns used to hide and onto the roof where the bell is. In these passages there used to be windows that would look into the cathedral where the nuns would watch the service from, because they were not allowed to be seen in public. Crazy catholics! | Shit,
I never thought I'd meet Brad Pitt in Sicily! |
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| This is a swimming/fishing area just east of Casteldaccia that you have to sneak through a fence to get to. There are a bunch of stone steps that had been cut out of this rock (called tufo) which you climb down (as pictured above with Brad Pitt) to get to the shoreline. The shore is a shelf that just drops off so you can dive in as you please, or you can fish (as the people here are doing). The water was so damn warm I cried tears of joy. | |
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| This was the procession for the festival of San Guiseppe (Saint Joseph) who is the patron saint of Casteldaccia. We watched everyone from the balcony of our house: first came a set of children dressed as angels with some priests, then a marching band, then the actual statue of San Guiseppe (as shown here), and then the crowd of townspeople. Men are carrying the statue, and they had to keep stopping every minute or so to rest, but everyone in front of them kept going, and so there ended up being a big break in the procession, ha. This is Via Lungarini, the main street in town which leads up to the piazza. They string these huge light fixtures between the buildings along the procession path. | The procession stops at a few places, including one where two girls dressed as angels "fly" towards eachother, hung on ropes held by men on balconies. When they meet in the middle they recite some dialogue about Jesus and Joseph for a few minutes, then shout "Viva San Guiseppe!" and are pulled to safety while the crowd is distracted by fireworks. And of course, this all happens at 11pm or so. We went to another procession in Palermo for the Festa de Santa Rosalia (way bigger, longer, and with stage and lighting budgets and live actors and singers) where they ended up having four sets of fireworks that went on for over an hour until 1:30 am. |
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| One of my favourite things was the Tomasello Pasta Factory, located right in Casteldaccia. They are one of the hugest ones in Italy and make over 100 kinds of pasta for other companies worldwide (any Americans eating Trader Joe's brand pasta should know it was made right here). They have their own mill, too, which is a giant building separate from the pasta-making one. We kept going into different rooms on different floors and saw things like this giant network of pipes that suck the grain to and from different places. | This was another room in the mill where these large blue box things were actually individually moving in a circular motion very fast, as if they were hula-hooping. It was so loud and hot inside! The old guy in the middle is a man who lives across the street from where we stayed and has worked at Tomasello for 60 years (I think he's retired now). |
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A
close-up of rotini being made! Longer pasta, like linguine, is hung
over a thin pole to dry, and then eventually the round end is lobbed
off to create two separate strands. It's all very exciting! |
A
machine making farfalle (bowties). The other part of the machine on
the left (which I could not fit in as my lens is only a 50mm, dammit)
was where the dough was punched out and pinched into shape. It was quite
fascinating. |
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| Here I am doing one of my favourite things, eating gelato! My ice cream had dropped out of my cone, but they gave me a new one for free, so I am posing with the one on the ground. This was actually the best gelato I had when I was there: cantalupo e anguria (cantaloupe and watermelon). We went back to the same place at the end of our trip but it wan't nearly as good, no idea why. Sicilians like to eat gelato in a brioche, which is a sweet bun split in half and filled with ice cream. It's so good because it ends up being a small meal! And I love how there are no sizes and you can get two flavours if you want, which I always did. I lived off hazelnut and chocolate most of the time, cause when it's really good, it's really, really, really good. | This is a section of one of the graveyards in Palermo that looks remarkably like an apartment building. Of course, this is only a small area of the graveyard. The rest of it is as densely packed and numerous family members are buried in a single plot (how does this work?). Pietro's father's family is buried in this cemetary under a stone cross which his great-grandfather chiseled himself as he was a stone carver (he had also worked on numerous notable buildings in the city, all of which I did not take a photo). There were also big mausoleums in this cemetary that made you think you were walking down a street between large stone buildings. Which I guess you kind of were. |
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| Renting a scooter in preparation for a trip around Sicily. Because everyone just owns one and there is no huge demand for rentals, scooters end up being kind of shotty if you rent them. For instance, in this photo they are taping on the tail light. | Whee, on the road south to Agrigento. Nice and hot! There were three scooters altogether on which road myself, Pietro, his uncle, father and brother, and his brother's friend. |
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This
was a castle in a town called Musomeli which, on the other side, hangs
over a huge cliff. There was a guy who sold |
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| Inside the castle. This is looking towards the area where the servants lived on the right, and through the door on the left is a big dining hall. Under the castle there were rooms for weapons, prisoners, and even torture chambers with holes in the ceiling so you could listen to confessions. There was also a chamber that was filled with water and had a trap door on top so people would fall in and drown if the owners opened it, ha. | These guys were building a road out of stone. I found this very exciting for some reason, I'm guessing because pavement is standard issue in a lot of places and stone is just so charming. |
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| Whee, here's Pietro at the Greek ruins in Agrigento, on the south coast. Touristy and not much else to say. These things are older than life itself. (Which is actually true if you believe that life is God, and that God is Christian or Catholic or Jewish or other Jesus-based religions). | A heartwarming scene somewhere near the port in Agrigento. I believe the men I was with were taking their obligatory post-lunch naps at this time. |
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Hey
look, I found a slide! |
And
here's the ladder for it! |
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| And lastly, we go to the Aeolian island of Stromboli. The port we stopped at is dubbed the smallest port in the world: we actually had to take a separate boat from the hydrofoil to the dock. The picture here is of this port, from which you must hike up the steep switchback "road" to get to the" town". There are no cars on this side of the island and so to move baggage and parcels they have a donkey which they load up and force to the top of the hills, who leaves little poopy nuggets on the walkway. The rocks around the shore are very hot during the day (I've never sweated so much in my life as I did hiking over the boulders) but luckily they create a perfect location to dip into the water from (I also have never felt as relieved as I did when I jumped in and the water was SO COOL AND REFRESHING AND AMAZING!). | Stromboli is an active volcanic island which spurts stuff out every 15 minutes or so. Of course, to get to the part of the island where you can actually see it, you have to pay for a boat trip to gawk from the sea, or a guide to take you up there. This wasn't so some years before when Pietro's brother came and hiked all the way to the top to camp, but since then an explosion had closed the trail we would have taken. Being the poor bastards we are, we just opted to sleep on these most uncomfortable rocks on the shore, on a bed of towel. The next day instead of hiking to the top we went to the beach and then caught the last 3-hour hydrofoil back to Milazzo (the main land), which made us miss the last train back to Casteldaccia and so we slept outside the train station on the pavement. It was suprisingly more comfortable than the rocks. |
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| One of our many late afternoons spent at the beach. I love the fact that not only am I taller than Pietro and his father, but also his entire extended family. (And, while amidst a tight crowd of people in Sicily, I actually had a decent view of my surroundings [which is not so in Vancouver], leading me to the scientific conclusion that Italians do indeed have a shorter average height! True!!!) Also note my white, white skin; people would stare at me wherever I went purely because I was so pale (and this photo was from the end of our trip, when I was actually quite tanned in redhead standards). | The Volkswagon Beetle that Pietro's Grandmother bought NEW back in the DAY (if she were still alive, I'm sure I'd be taller than her). The Sammarcos brought over new bumpers from Canada on the plane that summer since apparently it is insanely expensive to get VW parts anwhere convenient when you're Italian. |
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| The wild kitten in their garden that was toooo cute for words, even in English. We named him Olio, which means oil but sounds so adorable that it transcends all language barriers. | And lastly, Pietro picking figs in the garden. Damn, there was nothing as wonderful as walking up to the tree and popping a fig so ripe off the branch that it was oozing syrup, and then eating it... oh God. So fucking amazing. I probably ate at least seven million figs over the course of the month we were there, at the very least. |
In
conclusion, I have realised that the 50mm photographic lens is my worst
enemy, as I couldn't take a good photo of anything that was taller than
8 metres unless I was a kilometre away. Sicily is grogeous despite the
complete lack of customer service. Stores are open from 9am to 1pm,
and again from 4pm to 8pm, with a nice break for lunch and a nap in
between (you HAVE to nap in the heat, or you die). Also, and this is
a shame since you can get bottles of wine for a euro, no one drinks!
People have wine with dinner and everything, but pubs are few and far
between and probably under-populated. This also means that there are
no drunks walking around at night, which is probably a reason that people
let their stupid kids run around outside until midnight. People also
take their toddlers out to dinner, and since dinner starts at 8pm or
later, the kids are overtired and cry and whine all the bloody time,
and ruin everything for people like me (and this is not limited to dinner:
all children there are whiny, crying brats, at all times of day). And Pietro's cousins and their friends were all spoiled adults (albeit quite nice ones), who didn't really work and had their parents pay for everything they did. But I guess that's culture for ya, so ciao. |
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