Getting around Sicily without your own transport is achievable but sometimes not easy especially if your preference is for pretty villages over hectic cities, or you want to explore the interior of the island. So it was especially nice when today some kind friends took me to Tindari, to visit the 1960s Santuario di Tindari, which sits on a cliff above the small town of Patti on the Tyrrhenian coast.
santuario di tindari/the tyrrhenian coast below
While we were there, we had my favourite kind of lunch.
There are no menus in places like this, they just bring out wine and selection of nostri prodotti, or our products, and keep bringing you more things until you tell them to stop. Olives, tomatoes, bread, cheeses, meat. It sounds simple put like that, and it is. But in the best possible way.
I do like big cities and all they have to offer, but since I arrived in Sicily it has more often been the little places with seemingly not a lot to offer the visitor that I have wanted to visit. Maybe it's yet another facet of my Bogota hangover, along with an aversion to buses, reluctance to leave the building if it's raining and serious shoe-poverty.
When my parents visited in March we spent a day driving through the mountains that separate Milazzo from the Ionian coast on a very tiny but incredibly scenic road called the SS185, which climbs to 1270m at its highest point, just after this little village, Novara di Sicilia. When you reach the Ionian coast, you are not far at all from Taormina, perhaps Sicily's most famous tourist resort.
Novara di Sicilia reminded me a lot of Carlazzo, where I spent a month last summer. Also tiny, quiet and beautiful but at the opposite end of Italy, between Lake Como and Lake Lugano.
This time last year, I was nearing the end of my time in Libya and trying to make a plan for the summer. Although it is not quite time to leave yet, those what next? questions are starting to present themselves again. It has been nearly six months since I last packed a suitcase, but my flights home are booked for June 21st, which leaves not much more than a month to go. This is the simultaneaous blessing and curse of tefl teaching.
There are more pictures in the posts below, or from Tindari here and from the SS185 here.
