Sicilia – Spring Break (whoo!)

N.B. This post merely contains words. Colorful pictures are in the post below this one

I left Ferrara on the morning of Good Friday, heading to Sicily for my spring break. I traveled alone. I flew into Palermo, and it is a wonderful sight to walk out of an airport and have a beautiful view of the sea waiting for you. My main objective in Palermo was to see one of the Good Friday processions that I had heard about. Southern Italy in general is supposed to have some rather interesting religious practices that lie close to the edge of Catholicism and, some might say, Christianity. Examples are things like the fanatical love of Padre Pio, tarantism, the so-called cult of Mary, etc. Also, they do big Easter processions, usually on Good Friday, lasting for hours and hours, zig-zagging through the streets. Formerly, it was a tradition for a freshly released convict to play the main role of Christ carrying the cross. In the procession I saw, it was a little boy who played Jesus, carrying a little cross. The processions consist of “floats” with statues of either Jesus or Mary that are carried by 20-30 men. I am not quite sure why the floats are so heavy, but even 20 men strained to lift the them. I saw parts of two processions in Palermo, then I had a terrible pizza for dinner (thanks a lot for the recommedation, Lonely Planet).

The next day I headed to Trapani, on the western tip of Sicily. It is located on a peninsula and has to be the windiest city in the world. On Easter, called Pasqua here, I went and saw another procession, this one being much more joyous with a statue of the risen Christ instead of the dead one. Everybody was out in their finest clothes. I went to Mass at the local cathedral. Antonio, the man that ran my little hotel, knew I was by myself so he invited me to have Easter lunch with him, his son, and his son's girlfriend. This is a good example of southern hospitality, and I was happy to accept. We had a nice lunch, concluding with a dessert that was surprisingly similar to gooey-butter cake, though not as sugary. Antonio was a bit surprised that I had had something like it before because it is a very localized Sicilian pastry. We digested our food over a couple of after lunch drinks and then we retired to our rooms for naps. It was a bit lonely to be a couple thousand miles from home for Easter, but Antonio helped me feel at home in Trapani.

On Monday I visited a little mountain town outside of Trapani called Erice. Erice was very beautiful, but it is a bit sad to see a town that has no industry besides tourism. Anyway, I misjudged the complexity of Erice's city planning and somehow managed to get terribly lost in this small town. In other hilltop towns I've been to there are only two directions to go: up or down. Erice was a tangled mess of ups and downs in every direction. The weather was sunny when I got there, then it started to hail, then rain, then the fog rolled in, along with strong winds. I tried to warm myself in all of Erice's 61 churches that I could before I caught the bus back to Trapani. Open restaurants were basically nonexistent in Trapani on a Monday night so I ended up at a Chinese restaurant where I discovered that Italian-chinese food has basically no overlap with American-chinese food.

My next destination was Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily, where I based myself for an excursion up Mount Etna. I had a very hostel-ly hostel experience where I shared a room with seven strangers located above a noisy bar and twenty feet from the railroad tracks. And the showers were cold. However, it was a good experience, and I would stay their again, actually. In Catania, I saw a big open-air fish and meat market where you could see your bloody mass of meat cut right in front of you or you could tell the butcher exactly which fish head you would like to buy for lunch. And, since no one bothers with cleaning up, a big water truck came through at the end of the day and washed away all the blood and guts into the sewer. Also, for the record, maybe the cities in Sicily would be a little bit cleaner if such a thing as a public trash can existed anywhere. When I told Marco that statement he took the northern Italy point of view and said that Sicily is a public trash can. This is actually true to some extent because a lot of garbage and chemical/toxic materials are illicitly “hidden” throughout southern Italy, thanks to organized crime. The last important note about Catania is that I had a fantastic pizza with buffalo mozzerella and spicy Calabrian sausage on it. Era buonissima! This pizza made me reflect on the best pizzas I've ever eaten in Italy, the US, and even Canada. If there is interest, I can go into more depth on this subject in the future.

On Thursday, I took a tour of Mount Etna. My faithful guide, Caremello, picked me and seven others up and drove us as far up the volcano as we could go. Let me explain the weather. In Catania it was sunny. As we went higher and higher up the mountain, it started to rain, and then get foggy, and finally snow. This was not the spring break weather I was hoping for. We couldn't get anywhere near the top to see the craters because of the snow, but we did see some lava flows that were cooled. The best part was that we went into two lava caves that were really interesting. My mother would have hated them. Caremello did his best with the weather we had, and I am glad I took a tour instead of trying to take a self-tour using the bus. I found out that everything in my guide book about Etna was wrong because a lot of stuff was destroyed in an eruption seven years ago. It makes me wonder just how well-updated my guide books are.

Finally, I decided to take a night train back to Ferrara from Catania. Taking a train from Sicily is definitely very different than from Northern Italy. Everybody was speaking energetically, arguing often, offering each other food, smoking cigarettes, leaning out the windows, feet up on the seats. They would start conversations with me with the excellent observation, “You're not from Italy, are you?” In order to cross between Sicily and the mainland the entire train actually goes on a ferry, which is a strange situation in which to find yourself. It's kind of like the Lyle Lovett lyric, “If I had a pony, I'd ride him on my boat.” The train ride was about 14 hours long, and I don't look forward to trying to sleep through the night sitting on a train again anytime soon.
By deciding to travel by myself for a week, in a way I was giving myself the challenge to plan and carry out an entire trip by myself. I was proving my self-sufficiency, I guess. Through this experience I have had a few realizations:

1.I prefer to travel with others.
2.I should ask the locals for advice more often.
3.Going to restaurants by yourself is boring. Good ways to spend lonely dinners include doing the sudoku on the placemat or watching a soccer match.
4.When you are a stranger, even the smallest familiarity with a person becomes important. I think this is why I found myself, upon seeing them on the street, warmly greeting the waiters from the previous night's restaurant. What does this say about the human need for companionship?

Now I'm back in Ferrara. It's good to be home.