After a long, hot four days in Palermo we hired a car; we had to see more of the biggest island in the Mediterranean. Sicily edges out Sardinia for that title, and certainly is so much larger than Zakynthos, our home for the previous three months, that, unlike Zante, we rarely felt like we were on an island. But we were, and one originally settled by the Greeks, what’s more. Being good Greeks ourselves, we particularly wanted to see the ancient city of Syracuse, a full day’s driving away, diagonally opposite Palermo.
It was an at times dodgy drive across the island, made more difficult and hazardous by the fact that we had to use Sicilian roads. “The roads, the famous Sicilian roads, which had cost the Prince of Satriano the Lieutenant-Generalcy, were no more than tracks, all ruts and dust” is one quote from The Leopard (probably the island’s most famous contribution to the literary canon) that resonated. Compared to the ruts and dust of Lithakia, in Zakynthos, from which we’d come, the A19, cutting diagonally northwest to southeast, was mostly as smooth as a bistro toady’s patter, but the problem was that recent seismic activity had forced the closure of many lanes, forcing us frequently through hazardous chicanes, reminiscent of Mondello – not the beachside suburb north of Palermo but the racetrack just outside Dublin in County Kildare.
With hours of driving facing us we’d put the radio on. One of my travel philosophies is to always enrich my travel experiences with local music. To that end, we usually bring a portable speaker with us, and once settled in, find a corny playlist like Postcards from Sicily, Best Ever Greek Taverna Songs, Sibelius’s Norway, etc.
Having already been castigated for “overplaying” The Godfather soundtrack in our flat in Palermo, I’d moved on to some bel canto, in the form of Bellini’s Norma, an opera strongly associated with Sicily. Alas, the warblings of Maria Callas found little favour with resident music critic Eoin. Sometimes you’ve just got to go with Classical New Releases.
The music of a place, its classical, folkloric, or popular musical heritage and scene is, for me, as much a part of a visit as the food you get overcharged for, the cathedrals you get dragged into, or the wide open crumbling forts you sweat at. Palermo had been a cacophony of sirens, Ape taxis, shop owners shouting across the narrow streets at each other, and, yes, the Love Theme from The Godfather.
Every night as we walked home along Via Maqueda we’d pass the (touched, we eventually realised) guy sitting at Piazza Bellini with his ghettoblaster turned up to 11. No-one batted an eyelid at the deafening, overwrought pop; all part of life in the big city. I may as well learn something here, I thought one night, and Shazamed the racket as we passed him (in fact, I could have done so from back in our apartment). Since then all I have to do is put on Claudio Baglioni’s E Tu… and I’m right back there in the heat with Tina and the boys, the taste of Fúnnaco PizzaLab in my mouth, the shameful nudes of Fontana Pretoria and their glistening moonlit buttocks a sidelong glance away, all the while watching out for the daredevil ragazze on their bikes.
Syracuse
In Syracuse slightly ahead of time (there may have been some involuntary speeding-up as we passed Mt. Etna), we passed through the main part of the city and crossed the narrow strait into Ortigia, the southeasternmost tip of the city and at well into its third millennium the oldest part of it. This island was where we’d be for two days; at less than 1sq kilometer it’d be a nice change of scale from the sprawl of Palermo.
I’ll be honest: we paid scant attention to the famous Temple of Apollo. Under normal circumstances we would have, but we’d be seeing far more impressive (visually, at least) Greek- and Roman-era temples in a few days at Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples. What we did lavish attention on was Ortigia’s Baroque piazzas, its Fountain of Arethusa, and its speartip Castello Maniace, and not just because that’s where Indy finally gets to meet Archimedes.
Yes, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has some scenes shot in Syracuse, something I hadn’t realised until I watched it a couple of months later. Some in Cefalù too, doubling for Ortigia. Also interesting was the role played by the Antikythera Mechanism, the ancient astronomical device I wrote about in European Odyssey. In the movie the Greek, or rather, pre-Greek (because of course Greece didn’t exist at the time) mathematician Archimedes is presented as the mechanism’s inventor, and indeed the climax of the movie comes during the Roman siege of Syracuse, in which, according to myth, the city defended itself using a ‘heat ray’ invented by the great man, whereby giant lenses focussed light on the Roman triremes, setting them on fire. Even the Indiana Jones movie thought that one a tad unlikely. Although his giant claw device was actually used, apparently, under real siege conditions.
As an aside: from my investigations into the Mechanism – I read a book; twice, mind – it’s not clear that Archimedes made it. He might well have; he probably could have; but whether he did is pure speculation. It’s shocking that the makers of the Indiana Jones movie franchise took such liberties with the known historical facts.
And speaking of Castello Maniace – we discovered a nice piece of lexico-historical trivia there. Not long after gunpowder was discovered, in the 16th century, small circular objects made of metal or ceramics, into which gunpowder was stuffed, began to appear for the first time. With a lit fuse and an inbuilt triggering mechanism these would be thrown at one’s foes. Grenades, in other words. And they were given that name because they resembled granata – pomegranates.
When I read that in the small antiquarium just before entering the castle grounds I was reminded of the “Sicilian pineapple” scene in Il Cacciatore. I suppose it’s best to remember that Sicilians aren’t necessarily referring to the fleshy or dry ripened ovary of a flowering plant, enclosing the seed or seeds, when they’re referring to fructomorphic objects.
Ragusa
Making our way back along the southern coast, we paid Ragusa, near where Inspector Montalbano is filmed, a flying visit. What’s with all these movies and tv shows set in Sicily? Ragusa is an ancient town, deep in the island’s southeastern pocket, flattened by an earthquake in 1693, and rebuilt as a town split in two, all perched on a steep hillside. From our perspective, Ragusa Inferiore (Lower) was where people like us end up going, although in the July heat we were going to pay dearly for our visit to its Piazze and in particular its top-of-the-hill Duomo, no matter how cooling its dank interior.
Agrigento
Working our way clockwise around the island, like hands on the dial of an ancient mechanism designed to get the most out of a trip to Sicily, we made our way west to one last overnighter, in a town called Agrigento. Really, the only thing to see or do here is take a walk in The Valley of the Temples.
Maybe it’s all the geometry homework I’ve been helping Eoin with, but the best way to describe where this site is, one of the most impressive ancient Greek sites outside Greece itself, is to imagine drawing a median line from this triangular island’s northeast vertex at Messina to the southern base of the triangle, cutting it in two (that’s what medians do, after all). It’s actually a little in from the coast, just ten minutes’ drive from Agrigento town itself. Funny we had to come to an Italian island to see impressive Greek ruins, but there you go: Zakynthos just doesn’t have any of its own.
It was a hot, humid walk in the late afternoon, but being the largest archaeological park in Europe by the time we’d covered it all the evening had quite cooled down. The Temple of Concordia, easily the most spectacular structure in the Valley, is a more intact Parthenon, without the hordes and the scaffolding.
With an eye on the clock, we caught some local festivities in town the next morning, which mainly involved a) locals handing other locals and us free buns, which suited us since we’d stayed in one of those Airbnbs where the 2nd ‘b’ was just a broken promise, and b) Mexican-level vehicular and equine chromatic embellishments.
Bun-bloated and bronzed we made our way that last morning along the coast before turning inland and heading due north to the airport. The spectacular display at Agrigento was a fitting end; I’ll remember Sicily for its music, it’s food, but above all, its colour. With the heat closing in, we felt like we were getting out just in time. The beach at Porto Koukla awaited us.
kouklahouse.com 