Sicily. And the shadow of Etna.

Caltagirone.

Inland, the hill town of Caltagirone is a hotbed of ceramic talent. 

The churches are topped with ceramic tiled domes. Every pillar, bollard and practically every wall has tiled decorations. Street planters are huge prettily painted pots. And while we’ve seen ceramics everywhere on the island, here the extravagance, colour and detail pushes the limits of the craft. 

There’s a flight of 142 deep steps built to link the old town to the very old town. Each riser is tiled. At the top the balustrade around a further flight to access the museum has tiled strings (the uppy downy bits). 

You get the picture. This is tile town. Beautiful. Perhaps not at its best. But still thriving. 

Sicily Ranch. 

Only a few miles from Caltagirone we leave the road to bump down a track to Sicily Ranch. 

Tanya’s farm has space for a dozen vans among her chickens, turkeys, ducks, peacocks, geese, sheep, dogs and goats. Basil the donkey keeps to himself in the distance. 

There’s constant action with the chickens. 

Perhaps you get used to it, but I could watch these girls all day. They peck around the van, occasionally scared off by the peacock. The turkey isn’t aware of her size and differs to the chickens. The big Boxer-cross comes by now and then for a rub. 

There are eggs, herbs, salad vegetables, all there for the taking. 

Bliss. 

Mountains.

There’s driving. 

And there’s mountain driving. 

We’ll end the day at Avola. 

Most of you will have enjoyed bottle of Nero d’Avola, the robust red wine has a good distributor and is often available in the Coop and Sainsbury’s. 

We’ll end the day there, but there’s an interesting mountain range to scale first. 

From the west the curves are long, the gradient shallow, it’s a bank holiday Sunday morning, and no surprise, it’s swarming with motorbikes. There are far too many to keep an eye on so I concentrate on driving well, keeping right and letting them do their thing around me. 

A deep limestone valley falls to our right. 

Climbing high the flora kicked in as well as anywhere we’ve been. The dominant colours are purple and yellow, accents of red poppy, tiny orange marigold. 

Too much to see. Too much road to keep your eyes on. 

The town at the top of the hill is Palazzolo Acreide. We arrive around midday as the people are coming out in their Sunday finest to sit in cafés and gossip. 

Our café is a beautiful creation selling beautiful creations. While we tuck into savoury pastries the Sicilians are buying intricately constructed fancies that defy belief. 

Our choices: called closed pizza, it’s a puff pastry pie with tomato based filling. An Italian version of spanikopita. Two coffees. Total €6!

At the plant market there are fruiting lemon trees, kumquats, and tangerines, but we don’t have the room or the climate. Instead Minty bought our new friends Harry and Derek. 

The descent is thankfully quiet. If you have a hard road to drive do it on Sunday afternoon when everyone is at lunch. 

On the descent the curves are tight switchbacks with just enough road to pull the van around. At the bottom, nine degrees warmer, it’s the Mediterranean seaside, and this time the east coast. 

It’s still refreshingly unflash. Hardly a car that’d turn heads, except of course the gorgeous old Fiat 500s. 

The Service Station.

The Alfa Guilia police car pulls in, blue lights flashing. 

The emergency? Coffee. Served by muscles, a huge guy with a tiny waist. 

The police wear tight leggings, long boots, like motorcycle outriders. In a car. 

Alongside them at the bar a driver sips his beer. He’ll drive off in a minute. 

A massive Alsatian wanders around unhurried by life. 

Sicily. (She-see-lia).

The English pronunciation doesn’t do justice to the exciting sound a local creates when naming their island. 

Whatever food I order I look for the one called “Sicilian”. 

Sicilian ice cream in Noto? Orange and lemon ice creams blended with candied peel and dotted with pistachios. Far too big. Amazing. 

Sicilian sandwich? Ciabatta roll overfilled with tuna, tomato, salad leaves, peppers. Huge. Big enough for both, or lunch and tea. 

Sicilian pizza? Expect everything on. Especially artichoke. 

Big City Defectors. Ivan and Alesandro.

Mum Ivana and son Alesandro left a suburb of Milan to create a new life on Sicily. 

They fancied a field, maybe two. They bought 30 hectares of almond and olive groves, a gorge, and a cave system suspected to include a Byzantium prison. 

They take in vans, tents, and offer a rudimentary cottage. 

When we arrived Alesandro mowed a large square into the wilderness for our van. 

The wild flowers and grasses are often at my shoulder height, while some thistles are as tall as the van. 

Minty has managed to evade the hay fever until now, but deep in the clouds of pollen the sneezes finally start, they’re unlikely to ease until we’re back on the sea. 

Among the many birds there’s the churrrrr churrrr of turtle doves. It’s a special sound. I understand the many who mourn that it’s no longer heard in our lands. 

We meet Michea from The Netherlands. She and her boyfriend arrived here for a few days last spring, but their car broke down and they never left. Now they’re trying to buy the abandoned house next door. 

I’m moved by this place. I’m more drawn to it than anywhere else on this trip. Thankfully Michea crashed my dreams when she tells us how the summer is above 40 degrees every day, sometimes topping 50 degrees. There’s signs of fire everywhere.

St Just might occasionally get to 25 degrees. That’s fine by me. 

Etna.

I have never seen an active volcano. 

On a clear day we head from Ivana’s natural paradise up the motorway past Syracuse with its wild Church of Madonna in Tears that soars like some futuristic space city. 

To the right the coast. Clear. Bright. Hot. To the left a brooding mountain, its summit hidden in angry swirling clouds of ash and smoke. Etna. 

You can’t get too close at the moment. The volcano has been erupting since late ‘22, and taking an Italian cable car has lost some of its shine of late. Nonetheless, being close enough to hear its rumble at night convinces you that this is a power of nature best experienced at a distance. 

The van is parked between lemon trees in both fruit and blossom. The team is harvesting the fruit while another mows the flowers that make the grove so beautiful, but which divert precious water from the trees. The summer fire risk is already present and in a month all will be tinder. 

Noto.

I almost missed writing about Noto. 

It was a day of extreme contrast, and one worth capturing. 

Leaving Avola (lending its name to the Nero d’Avola grape) it was a short climb up to the incredible religious city of Noto. 

Religious? Isn’t all Sicily? Yes, but this place… it once had 11 convents and 8 monasteries, many of the hotels between these were built to house visiting church dignitaries. And in what style!

The nobles of the time would build a church (there are still 30) and each would have to outdo the joy and splendour that went before them. 

Today we have the pleasure of getting church blind visiting these golden temples. 

The cathedral is refreshingly spare with its modern stained glass and ethereal light. The ceiling frescoes look new. 

The Church of Santa Chiara charges just €2.50 to climb to its highest terrace for an even better view over this incredible town. 

Minty found Seven Rooms Villadorata, a rather tempting place to stay. A palazzo with suites – except there was only one two night stay in May available, at €3058! 

I love that anyone can come here, park for free and wander the sights. But perhaps most of us need to stay elsewhere. 

Later in the month there’s a flower festival here where the many steps of the town are decorated with millions of petals. The pictures look stunning, but by  then the hospice will need Minty, and St Just’s taxis will need driving. 

Driving.

Last week I commented that Sicilian driving is pretty calm compared to mainland Italy. 

There are qualifiers. 

If you accept that the Italians are the best at overtaking then you let them off when they pass you in crazy places. 

Today I could see for a mile in front on a near straight road. There was a single truck and a car approaching. There was a fast car approaching from behind. The slightest easing of his accelerator would have enabled the truck and car to quietly proceed, then fast car could pass moments later in complete safety. 

No chance. 

Instead he forced a third lane passing us at the exact time the truck was passing in the opposite direction. 

Impact speed would have been 130mph+. It would have involved all four vehicles. 

Thankfully I expected it, as did the truck, and we both moved right a little saving the day, and giving a good excuse for some horn action. 

Then there’s speed. 

There are many unrealistically low speed limit signs. 

They are utterly ignored. 

Sicilians don’t generally drive ridiculously fast, but neither do they pay any attention to speed limits.  

In France, Germany, and particularly Switzerland, limits are observed. Here no one gives a jot, not even your friend’s granny, unless there’s a known camera. 

That makes for a tough drive as a foreigner. If you obey a limit for a junction there’ll be plenty of horn action. 

If you stop at a red light when it has only just gone red you’re likely to be rear ended (like Manchester). 

There’s also the issue of white line paint. Either the mainland stopped sending it a decade ago, or it has been diverted. Very few junctions have line markings and that’s particularly challenging when some roundabouts require you to stop on your way around, but others give the driver on the roundabout priority. 

What you end up doing is watching everyone far more than you would normally, trying to anticipate the other driver’s move. 

Peter Pan di Privitera.

Parked up at the very smart Fossa Lupo Agriturismo. We missed out on a table for their 1st May celebrations and had to forage pizza (hardship, I know). 

It’s only a 20 minute walk, but it’s enough to remind us that Sicilian pavements are not designed for walking on. 

Instead they’re for bin bags, parking, street light pillars that take the whole pavement, dog shit, huge bags of gravel, overgrown hedges and empty bottles. 

Every walk is an education and often the learning is that the locals don’t walk anywhere. 

We’re resilient though and arrive at Peter Pan around 7.00pm (long before the local stomachs begin to rumble). 

We’re welcome, even when we order a pizza between us. 

We’re immediately upsold an arancini as a starter – bloody marvellous, by far the best we’ve had. 

The house red is Nero d’Avola (from down the road), it’s fabulous. 

The pizza is too big even for sharing. And even with a bottle of fizzy water the bill just topped £20. The wine alone was worth that. 

We offered the best compliment we knew – we went back next night and did it all again. 

Taormina. The money box.

From about ten miles away the already dramatic scene takes a notch upwards. 

To the left Etna has shed its cloud this morning, to the right the sweep of the deep blue bay opens up. 

On two steep hills ahead there are towns that look impossible from this distance. Impossible because of the effort to build so high, on such steep hills. 

When we mentioned that Taormina would be our next stop people didn’t tend to say how special it is, they’d just say how expensive it is. We would manage it well.

Parked up at a costa in nearby Naxos we caught the bus. 

It’s just an ordinary bus, but it’s no ordinary bus ride. Once we’re past the station the climb starts. Switch after switch as the full length coach winds through the bends. There’s reversing. There are scared oncoming drivers. But our man forges on and up. 

Every step of the way our view just got better.  The vertical drop is frightening, don’t look straight down.

The view is of the whole bay but in particular the Isola Bella, a ridiculously pretty rock rising from the beach, big enough for a large villa, nature and by the look of it, hordes of people. 

When we pull into the bus station at Taormina I want to congratulate the driver. An impressive feat of driving, patience and somehow doing all that while dealing with the stupidity of all the tourists who’d failed to understand the system (that’s if you believe there is a system). 

The town is heaving. Every tour stops there. The money is sucked there. Dolce and Gabanna have a café. Louis Vuitton will sell you a bag. Perhaps a scarf from Dior? The hotels are incredible. The restaurants are packed. There’s a cable car down to the beach. And despite the silly brands, the local produce shops are beautiful whether they’re selling ceramics or pasta. There’s a price to this place, but you don’t have to pay it.

For us there’s a never ending flight of steps to take us high above the town, first to the church carved from the rock, and then to the Norman castle that commands a lookout possibly unequalled in the world. Chuff we were hot by the time we got there. 

From the top we had a great view of the Greek amphitheater in the town. We didn’t visit, not because of the price, but because of the length of the queue in full sunshine.

Contrast.

It’s contrast that makes a week feel like a month, and this week it has been extreme. Mountains and plains. Rough camping in just mown fields to laughing at the prices at Louis Vuitton. We’re 2,000 miles into the journey and it’s time to turn for home. We won’t be rushing it though and every step will be an adventure.