Taormina and Alcantara

They sound like names for ballroom dances, don’t they?  On the subject of names, my name for our car is Darth – imagine a 2 door, black, Fiat Bambini with a sunroof – its like like I’m driving Darth Vader’s helmet!   Our current “home” is at Nicolosi, a town on the southern flank of Mt Etna.  This morning we ventured north on the autostrada to Taormina.  Which sounds simple enough, but to get to the autostrada involves about 40 mins of convoluted, and at times disconcertingly narrow, navigation and driving. (This afternoon on the way back up to Nicolosi we “kissed” side mirrors with a car going the other way, thankfully at low speed and no damage done!)

Just as well our TomTom is now working. And that’s another story…. 

Fiat 500s have the cigarette lighter arranged vertically in the consol between the front seats. On our first day with the car we somehow organised for the TomTom power plug to self-disassemble in the lighter socket. Four pieces were involved, and we now have three of them. The fourth is somewhere in the bowels of the car. So we spent a day using the TomTom sparingly, just on its battery. Inevitably, the crunch came when the battery was critically low and we were an hour of back roads and ridiculous village spaghetti streets from our lodgings. Talk about necessity, invention and motherhood! I had the plug working with a bit of screwed up parking ticket in 2 minutes flat! And that’s how it’s still working…

Getting back to Taormina – what a lovely spot. We really enjoyed the theatre. As Jen remarked, you expect a crowd at the theatre.  It doesn’t look like it in the picture, but there were hundreds of people milling about.  I’m sure we saw it quite differently from how Pip saw it in February.  I don’t think there were any cruise ships in when she was here, and there probably weren’t too many school groups either. So it was very crowded and quite warm. 

Every shop and every cafe was doing a roaring business.  From memory, Pip had clear skies over Etna, which has stubbornly remained shrouded in cloud. 

We walked up to the Saracen castle above the town, and that’s one thing that hasn’t changed since Pip was here – it’s peaceful, quiet and still shut!

After an arancine each for lunch we headed inland to the Alcantara Gorge, which has a pretty weird set-up. As far as I can work out, there is a business that owns the land above the gorge that does lots of marketing - “Free Parking”, etc etc and charges 8 euro per adult to access the gorge, while 200 m up the road is a public right of way that gives free access to the gorge. No-brainer, really. Unfortunately there has been a flood though the gorge recently, so the normal practice of wading through the gorge now would require some pretty strenuous swimming against the current in very cold water. So just a quick look.

We spent most of our time a little further up the valley at a place called Francavilla, which had an overgrown, ruined castle to explore.  The width of which in places was ridiculous!  One metre wide with sheer drops either side.  But spectacular views!

 

Tomorrow Etna, hopefully with fewer clouds than today.