We all went to the dentist for a cleaning this morning. We have gone to the same dentist in the States for more than twenty years and now see the daughter of our original dentist. We love them and they are almost like family to us but there are three things about the dentist we use here that are better. I've probably mentioned some of this before, but first, the dentist has to do the actual cleaning work. Hygienists aren't a thing legally here. Not sure if this means a better cleaning, and a case could be made to think they do not, but I like that the boss does the heavy lifting. Two, so spit splatter doesn't get in your eyes, they put a cloth over them. It is dark and your mind wonders as to what they may do to you under anesthesia, but it is way better than looking into the goggles you get in the States where you look up close at the residue of saliva from the last 5 (10?) patients. Finally, they still have the spit sink. It is an ultra modern office and they have all the latest technology, including the suction straw. And the water that dispenses into the cup must be controlled by some weight system as it refills exactly to the same level no mater how much starts in the cup. I mentioned that there are no spit sinks in the States anymore and asked why they still have them in Taiwan and got the obvious reply..."Chinese people like to spit."
Sitting in the waiting room, and after 5 minutes Betty turns to me and says 'I hate that noise' and I immediately agree. They play this absolutely horrific new age Chinese piano tinkling crap on a loop and it is drilling into my brain. Take a second and ask Betty what noise is she talking about and she is referring to the sound of a tooth being drilled into down the hall. I hadn't noticed that sound at all but was obsessed with the Asian John Tesh. Amazing how we can perceive the world around us so differently. Which reminds me that I still need to write my Yo La Tengo love letter here soon.
Oh yeah, forgot one more thing I like about the dentist here.
Before digging back into the travelogue, looked back on my notes and had a couple things I forgot previously. Some random thoughts bullet point style.
- The morning we were going to leave for the trip and am sitting at my receptionist job, and this huge dude and his wife come in. When I say huge, talking 6'4", 350 pounds with purply varicose veined legs to match. He said he wanted to come see what the Center was all about after reading something they did on line, but suspect his wife just takes him places so she doesn't have to listen to him talk, cause that is what he did in a non-stop free association way for the next hour and a half. Sitting at the front desk, was the natural target of his ravings. Other folks would walk into the area, get a quick whiff and keep on walking, leaving me alone. Even the wife tuned out and went to read a magazine somewhere else. He spoke English well but had a heavy accent and I stupidly asked where he was from. "I am Genovese" he says and even more stupidly mention we are headed to Italy that evening. For the next 10 minutes he told me all that was wrong with Italy (according to his diabetes riddled mind). Started off with 'better bring your Khalishnikov and when I said I didn't carry one, turned his ire to the gypsys that were something like 1/2 the population according to him and described some of the ways they were going to distract us foreigners and steal our money. Hearing we were headed south, said that everything south of Rome as no better than North Africa.
- Two things I found unusual about the people we saw. They all wear puffy coats. This might not be an Italian thing cause all the ladies in our party wore them too, but do not remember them being so ubiquitous previously. I thought the Italians had more of a fashion sense but maybe the crazy guy in the lobby was right about the unsophisticated southerners. One thing they do in Italy that I know they don't do in the States, or anyone else I've seen in the last few years, is to actually talk into their cell phones. It was immediately noticeable and saw it throughout the two weeks...people having loud and animated conversations with other people on the phone. Tell me the last time you saw someone do that or actually did it yourself?
- In Naples, we were talking about the Inquisition and one of the affects was that there were a lot of orphans. The Italian word for orphans is Esposito, which means literally 'left outside', and today,
Esposito is the 4th most common surname in Italy.
- In the Taormina post from last time, I forgot to mention the Christmas tradition we saw at breakfast. At this time of year, dudes in traditional garb break out their
zampognas and serenade people with folk music. Serenade may be a strong word as it implies entertainment, cause the zampogna is a slightly less offensive bagpipe instrument. The sound is equally offensive, but the instrument itself is a sheep carcass. Was kinda cool for a minute or so.
OK...movin' on.
We hit Siracusa late afternoon. The historic part of town is called Ortygia. As with all things Italy, it has a long history of occupation but the first major one who left a lasting impression archaeologically on it were the Greeks. Was a major city of the Corinthians. We hired a really enthusiastic young lady to take us around...
She majored in archeology in school and really knew her shit...naming Italian artists that no one had ever heard of as if they were Michelangelo. The highlight of the Greek ruins was the theatre. The Spanish (natch) carried off a lot of the limestone, but it was grand. Still cannot comprehend how they satisfied 20,000 people without any amplification. They put on shows (Greek tragedies) here in the summer that must be something else, but I can only think how amazing it would be if my beloved Yo La Tengo plugged in when I visit these old sites.
The Arena, which was built during the Roman era was also neat and Enrica told us why they call it an arena. They used to put sand on the floor of the place to soak up the blood of the gladiators. The Latin word for sand is arena so there you go. I knew this already from listening to the History of English podcasts (awesome, check them out), but kept it to myself so the others could be amazed.
We split the tour up between the ancient Greek sites in the AM and the old Ortygia part of the city in the afternoon and stopped for lunch in between. Enrica not only knows about obscure Italian artists, but she knew where to eat. We went through the local food market on the way...I become bored quickly with churches and Greek ruins, but will never get sick of walking through a local market and seeing all the colors and smelling all the smells.
We had lunch at this place and she suggested we try the "Terra". Oh my god...what an amazing plate of local flavors. They told us what they all were but forgot all of it. I asked later what one particularly gamey meat was (at bottom) and the proprietor said it was horse. And there was a cannoli in there for dessert. Just a fantastic experience.
Outside was a coin operated soccer pinball game. These kids didn't have coins to play it but were just banging on the levers. The fat kid wanted in but the wirey little punk wouldn't give him a chance. The dance went on for a good 5 minutes
The old part of Siracusa was compact and charming
Different eras on top of one another...the fountain is from the 1700's while the round building behind is from the Mussolini fascist design.
Archimedes made his biggest discovery here and they celebrate his achievement in the best possible way
Like I said, have seen a lot of churches in life and so am hard to impress, but the one here was astounding as it was a layered cake of all the civilizations that had passed through. Early Christians literally filled in a Greek temple and they have been adding onto it ever since. Not the most gorgeous of churches but certainly historically engaging.
The patron saint of Siracusa is Santa Lucia. I clipped her bio and present it here:
Biography
"The young Lucia, whose father had died when she was only six, belonged to a rich family in Syracuse and had been promised in marriage to a pagan man. Her mother Eutychia had been ill for years and tried many remedies, to no avail. So Lucia joined her on a pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Agatha, where they prayed for the mother's healing. During the prayer Lucia fell asleep and dreamed of St. Agatha, the child martyr, saying to her: "Lucia, why are you asking me what you yourself can obtain for your mother?"
In the vision, St. Agatha also predicted her patronage on Syracuse. Once back home, Eutychia was healed, and Lucia told her mother of her firm decision to consecrate herself to Christ. Her betrothed became suspicious on seeing his promised bride sell all her properties and give them to the poor, and denounced her as a Christian. The famous trial of Lucia before Archon Paschasius proved her faith and also her pride in proclaiming herself a Christian. Threatened to be sent to a brothel among prostitutes, Lucia said, "The body is contaminated only if the soul consents." The magistrate ordered to carry her there, but her body became so heavy, that dozens of men could not move her. In her answers to the judge Lucia embarrassed the Archon so that, in order to bend her, he used tortures. But Lucia was unharmed, knelt down and was beheaded. Before her death, she announced the end of Diocletian's rule and peace for the Church.
There is no foundation to the medieval tradition that Lucia gouged out her own eyes, before execution. The emblem of the eyes on a cup, or plate, is to be connected to her name "Lucia" coming from the Latin lux (=light). In the iconography the eyes are often accompanied by a dagger stuck in her throat, which derives from another tradition that described her death by "jugulatio" rather than by beheading.
The body of the saint, taken away from Syracuse in ancient times by the Byzantines, was later stolen by the Venetians, who conquered Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and is currently preserved in the church of San Geremia in Venice. The sacred remains of the saint returned exceptionally to Syracuse for seven days in December 2004 on the occasion of the 17th anniversary of her martyrdom. The arrival and departure of the remains were greeted by an amazing crowd, and because of very high participation and devotion, the bishops of the two cities have spoken of a possible permanent return to Syracuse.
The worship
Saint Lucia is the protector of the eyes, of the blind, eye doctors, electricians and masons. There is also a common popular exclamation in Italy, "Oh Santa Lucia!" when you have been long looking for something which is actually under your nose and you finally find it."
Three things. First, am already screaming 'Oh Santa Lucia' (in a heavy Italian accent) when I find something. Two, all the images of her in Siracusa depict her with the knife in her neck 'jugalitio' style, which makes it a delight to the kiddies. And three, in the church, there is a famous painting of her death by Caravaggio. I knew the name but not his work as it is in a dark Baroque style of which I am not a fan, but we learned that he painted this work while on the run after killing a guy during a disputed tennis match.
We liked Siracusa (and by we, I always mean me) cause it was compact and had a cool hippie like vibe in places.
Plus, the fresh squeezed cannoli place was very close to our hotel.
If you know me at all, you know that there is nothing I appreciate more than to have my cannoli freshly squeezed.
The plan was to drive across the island towards Palermo the next day. This is the day where the AdBlue from a previous post finally ran out. And since we were traversing it from south to north, we got into a discussion as to how big Sicily is. I gave the over/under as the size of Ohio (44,825 sq mi). We've all seen Sicily on a map a million times and it must look bigger due to its prominence, and that I've never driven in Ohio outside of Cleveland, cause it is less than a quarter of Ohio at 9,925 sq mi . Just bigger than Vermont and just smaller than Massachusettes. Surprising.
Had some thoughts on a midday stop for us and Enrica said we should make it
Piazza Armerina. Not the town itself, but a site called
Villa Romana del Casale, which is 300 AD Roman villa that was buried in mud in the 1200's and not rediscovered until the 1900's. The floor mosaics were said to be pristine. We were all kinda skeptical as we'd seen many so far and while nice, most were incomplete and damaged. This place had dozens of rooms filled with them and all intact.
The bikini girl room was a highlight
And more cyclops.
Very good and Enrica was right.. We hit the town of Cefalu, which is a coastal town an hour east of Palermo, that afternoon. It is a summer beach town that is stunning and we thought that an afternoon/evening strolling around would suffice.
A dude was out surfing.
Stumbled into a wedding
At dinner, which was at a delightful place run by only two people, a mom in the kitchen and her son doing all the work out front, we got onto 80's TV shows. Somehow, Alan Thicke's name came up and for the life of us, we could not remember the title of the show he was on. We could name all the actors and chracters, even some plot lines. I obsessed for the entire meal and told the kids that this is what we used to do for hours in the pre-internet days for fun...get drunk and try to remember arcane trivia
Growing Pains.
Our last stop of the trip was Palermo. Was obvious that the group was hitting their limit as they wanted to sleep in and leave at 11am, even calling me names when I countered that we should be on the road by 9am. I did some research and talked them into 9:30 by showing that one of the places on the itinerary closed for lunch and we could miss it or go early. On the way to our hotel, there were a couple of sites to check out.
Monreale Cathedral is perched on a hill outside of town. Yes, another cathedral, but what else are you gonna do in Italy. Baroque/Gothic, fine glass or golden splendor, they do start to look the same. Trying to make a game out of it, told the crew to look for the Pantocrator. This one is a bit confusing, but it is a depiction of Christ as the almighty, which is usually reserved for God only. Only once in the New Testament is Christ referred to in this manner and depictions of him as pantocrator are rare. I know it is a stretch to get my atheist kids interested, but it was all I had.
The real destination this morning that I was sure would please were the
Catacombe dei CappucciniKids of all ages dig dead bodies. This trip promised to have lots of them...Pompeii citizens frozen in time, the bones of Naples, even that 25,000 year old pregnant chick, but had to agree that they were all a skosh disappointing. These catacombs blew any previous dead guys away and all the kids and I agreed that this was a top two site of our trip (with the water buffalo mozzarella place being the other)
They started mummifying priests bodies in 1599 and putting them in this catacomb, and for the next 200 years, it became the thing to do in town. The cities wealthier denizens would request to be mummified and put here in their finest cloths. Someone equated that today, rich folks like to show off their wealth with a fancy car and this was the way they displayed their status in their time. Hair and skin were still on many of the bodies. We were the only ones in the place for a while and it was mesmerizing.
More than any other of the places we visited, Palermo seemed like a place I could get used. Some history of note...unlike Siracusa, it was founded as a Phoenician city in 700BC and then was ruled by Carthage, Rome, France and Spain (with the Spanish occupation coinciding with the Inquisition...they cleared out the cities Jews and Muslims in their own special way...I asked our guide if there was any lasting animosity towards the Spanish and he said the Sicilians were too lazy to hate). Palermo is where the drive to unify Italy began under Garibaldi, was leveled during WWII and had been the site of two major mafia wars. A compact city center that still retains much of its ancient charm alongside many buildings still bombed out from the war (Sicily has 200 churches and 50 are still shuttered from the allied bombing). The population is darker skinned than you see elsewhere owing to this history, but you also see the blond/blue eyed folks from the European eras.. An Imbrogulio family legend is that our ancestors came to America from Sicily and we all play that up to a point, especially when someone is messing with us, but I didn't feel as if these were my people. Locals asked if our name was Italian and then they all pronounced our surname differently than we do.
We tooled around the city our first afternoon and then had a walking tour the next morning. Our guide Domenico was a hoot. He started off slow and we were a bit concerned with his energy level, but we quickly got in tune with each other and his sarcastic humor matched ours. He could easily have fitted in with us on the car rides. He did make a mistake early though. His tour not only included the sites in town, but a big part of it centered around Palermo's highly touted
street food. As he was describing some of it, said we'd end the tour with "the best cannoli we've ever tasted." We pounced and challenged him by touting our lengthy history with the confection.
A great tour...showed us some churches and fountains, but we more enjoyed the graffiti and stories.
Fountain of shame...a Reneissance fountain from Florence that was brought piece by piece, but was so risqué for local Catholic taste that they tore off the penises and other genitalia.
The balconies from the 1800's are bowed out to accommodate the large dresses that the fashion of the time.
And the patron saint of Palermo is Saint Rosalia, who went to live as a hermit in 1159 and whose remains were found 400 years later, which coincided with the end of the plague. Unreal how many of these Catholic images are so dark
He mentioned how he was a kid during the Second Mafia War, which I had never heard about and went back and did a deep dive on the history. 1000's killed in the street, including government prosecutors, with the ultimate victors being the Corleone family. You can't make this stuff up although they've done a damn good job of it. While reading about it, discovered that they are in the early stages of the third war as the immigrants arriving en masse are horning in on the Corleone turf. While most North Africans land in Sicily, most move onto other parts of Italy and Europe due to a lack of working opportunities, but there is a reported Gambian drug gang that is threatening the locals trade and there have been many of the Africans gunned down in the streets over the last year. An article about it and some graphic footage can be
found here.
Recognized where that assassination occurred as we had just spent time in that bustling street market on the tour (think Pike Place without any of the tourist stuff, jammed like a mosh pit with elderly Italian women forcing/groping you through the narrow passages). Towards the end of the tour, Domencio whispers to us that this is where Tony Soprano's relatives hang out. We kinda pause and look around and sure enough, it's like a scene from the show right in front of us. A bunch of dudes all sporting the greasy haircuts and tacky track suits standing around looking like an audition for Goodfellas. They seemed to be led by the 400 lb fat guy that had to move via a scooter cause he was too massive to walk. The bike looked like a tricycle beneath him. We didn't dare whip out the cameras at that point.
Was a fantastic market though...everything you could want to buy. There is 40% unemployment in Palermo and many of those without "jobs" make their money here. At one point, Domenico turns to me, points to some vegetables and says, "Sicilians have the longest zucchini's. Know what I mean?" Yes I get it Domenico, I'm Sicilian too, remember?
We ate so much that day. We had already eaten breakfast and were finding it hard to find room for all of treats that we were shown, but we did our best. We enjoyed most of it with the cermino (a cold coffee drink...I asked where they get their coffee and he said it was all Brazilian and that Sicilians weren't great at growing or roasting coffee, but expert at drinking it) and arancini being our favorites.
We had one of those arancinis at a tourist stop a couple days earlier, and at a breakfast buffet before that and found them all delightful, but these were fantastic. I did get pissed thinking about tourist things in the states and how they will have limited food options like stale nachos or heat roller hot dogs. Why not branch out and offer something easy to make/keep fresh that is delicious?
Of course, we had to try the famous
Pane con la milza, which is a spleen sandwich. Spleen, along with a bit of liver, esophagi and trachea deep fried in lard and served on a bun.
Fine. I didn't think it was all that but was tasty enough. Only Chiquita wouldn't try it and most only had a bite or two, including Betty who was so grossed out at the thought of spleen that she only had a small nibble. Domenico hears this and is incredulous..."but you're Chinese?"
Nearing the end of the tour and it's cannoli time. The best ever? We walk up to his shop and it is the same place the kids and I got one the day before. I will say that they were excellent...freshly squeezed with light toppings of pistachio on one side, mandarin slice on the other, but Domenico was a bit deflated we stepped on his grand finale.
Damn I love cannoli. Domenico tried to rally and we stopped at the ice cream store where we tried pistachio ice cream served on a brioche bun, which was interesting in theory, but still prefer a nice waffle cone. Never realized how much I love pistachio.
On New Year's Eve, we ate a late dinner and checked out the scene in a couple of plazas that we heard were having music. We first went to the one outside the opera house (Teatro Massimo). The moms and I only had toured it that day and the guide kept comparing it to the opera house in Vienna, which we had all seen a couple years earlier. Don't get me wrong, it was very nice, but the Austrian one felt grander, and cleaner. You coulda eaten off the floor at that place but I wouldn't eat a spleen sandwich here. I will give a nod to the Palmeteran tour though cause it showed us the theatre and let us alone while the one in Vienna went to excruciating technical detail. They have cultural clichés for a reason
As you can see, the scene outside the Opera House was tame. They were broadcasting the ballet Swan Lake on a big screen...snoozer. The party down the street in the Piazza Politana was way more festive. Champagne was sold, an area with the local kids blowing up stuff and a dinosaur Italian rock band playing what we could only guess were the "hits" on stage. Not too crowded and a decent scene. We lit off our sparklers and got doused with champagne
There must have been a sale on the Chinese lanterns cause we saw a bunch of them. Not in the air mind you but in various stages of being burnt. Saw a dozen or more go up in flames and while the Italians have mastered pasta, they need to leave this activity to the Chinese. Betty tried to jump into help a group at one point, trying to explain to them her theories on thermodynamics. We felt embarrassed for all concerned.
Our friends left the afternoon before us and the Imbros went for a final dinner at a restaurant we loved from a couple nights previous.
Finally met a person that looked like me and felt like I had made it home.
