Is that the city?

Back to photos!!

Remember, once upon a time, so long ago we can barely remember, I went to Sicily. Husband had a conference and I sat by the pool. Well, those meanies at the conference decided to give everyone the afternoon off, so their brain didn’t turn to mush by the time it was all over.

Leif, Jim and I decided to take the afternoon and check out the town of Taormina. It is north of Catania, and according to the guidebooks, quite the tourist destination. But some friends at the conference had spent the week before there and suggested we check out (yet another) Greek Theater. Plus, the sights were supposed to be amazing.

We had to drive to the city. The drive wasn’t bad, if a little boring and uninteresting, scenery-wise. I think that’s because we decided to take the highway and not the more scenic local roads. Jim doesn’t like being honked at.

But on our way up, we see this:

Is that a city on that rock? Is that where we are going? Do you see a road leading up to that or are we going to walk? I’ll admit, I was a little concerned.

But Toarmina is definitely used to the tourist hordes. There were actual PARKING LOTS. With space to put your car. It was posted, with actual signs and everything. I almost felt like I was back in the states. But to get to the parking lot, we had to cross this terrifying bridge. I only have a very vague recollection of it because it freaked me out good. Thank goodness I wasn’t driving. We would have come to a screeching halt in the middle of the road. I vaguely remember that it was only two lanes wide, with no shoulder. There were guard rails, but come on now. I really don’t know how it was held up. Toothpicks probably.

But husband was driving and so we made it safe and sound. At the parking lot, there was a BUS that took us up to the main square of the city, so it was quite painless. No walking at all.

It was much more crowded than Syracusa. There were people everywhere, but it was a very pretty town. We made our way up to the Greek Theater and saw some of the most amazing views of the trip.

Well, of course, we’re not the amazing views, but the coast and Etna behind us are!

The ocean was SO stinking blue. I could have sat there for hours!

Above the city sits the castello. You can hike up there, but it takes about 30 minutes and it was pretty hot out that day. The views would have been amazing, but we made do with what we saw from the Greek Theater.

As usual, the “Greek” theater is now almost entirely Roman (rebuilt in 3 Before Canada) and of course obscured from our view by some stupid concert set. (We were 0 for 3 in the Theater seeing department.)

Remember, scientists can take the fun out of any occasion. They were talking about science.

I like this next photo:

I don’t know for sure, but I hope those columns are some of the original Greek columns that the Romans incorporated into the “new” theater. Plus, you can see the cheap stone on the inside of the walls with the more expensive brick on the outside.

Whew!! All that looking can make a person awfully thirsty. Plus it was getting late in the day, so we found a place to have a drink, right next to a beautiful church:

Can you imagine getting married there? Well, someone did! At some point, a bride passed us on the street. Plus we kept seeing all of these people dressed to the nines, promenading in the sunset. Very cool.

I left the boys to do some tasting of the local beverages while I did some shopping. I passed a shop and saw a rug that I really wanted:

I’m not sure if it goes into the “Dogs in Inappropriate Places” photo essay, but it made me laugh.

As we were leaving, I saw a GREAT sign:

If you don’t read Italian or English, or even if you do, does this really explain what is forbidden? Holding hands? Relationships? And what is the last one? No eating? Thank god they didn’t catch us at dinner then!

One thing I will miss about Italy:

Well, duh, the wine!! But beyond that, this is a bottle that we bought in Toarmina. Even though we were going to open it in about 3 hours, they wrapped in beautiful paper and tied a ribbon on it. Almost everything that you buy in the smaller shops is wrapped up in beautiful bags or paper. I will miss that pride.

Syracuse, Syracusa, Siracusa?

Remember how I said that it was hot when we visited Siracusa? It was really hot, about a billion degrees. We parked about 16,428 miles from the interesting parts of the city in order to avoid the traffic. Leif and I decided that it was really too hot to walk and Jim should drive down to Ortygia, the island which makes up the old part of Siracusa. Remember, we don’t have good maps of the town, which really didn’t matter because once again Jim had to put up with two people yelling opposite directions at him from different parts of the car. I really am amazed that Jim didn’t kill one or both of us.

No one honked at us the whole way into the city! But we couldn’t figure out what the parking signs meant once we were downtown. We knew that they said something about residents and parking but couldn’t decide if the sign meant that only residents could park there or if they weren’t supposed to park there. Leif and I had a nice discussion for about 5 minutes before I wandered over to a restaurant to ask for clarification. After they told us we would go to parking jail, we found a nice pay lot with plenty of spaces to park.

Lunch was next on the agenda. We happened to park right next to a restaurant that was recommended in the Rough Guide (lots of good info, but not as funny as my boy, Rick). This sounded great to us and we marched right over. There was this gentleman in a black suit standing at the entryway and I just assumed that he was a maitre d’. My bad. He was a patron, and probably part of the mafia. I think this was the case because it took about 10 minutes for someone to bring us a menu after we sat down. I think that he had a few words with the staff…

(By the way - in most Italian restaurants, they don’t have a hostess stand or someone waiting to seat you as you walk in. You see an empty table and just grab it. It takes some getting used to at first but I kind of like it. I get to chose where I sit. Back in the states, I’m not enjoying having my table chosen for me. Call me a control freak!!)

But we finally get some food, and more importantly, wine!

Jim modeling our wine choice. Notice the name on the bottle. I wonder if the guy I offended is related…

This was my lunch. It was the local fritto misto, or mixed fried stuff. It was the best calamari that I think I have ever eaten, including the appetizer at 23 in Chapel Hill!

What meal in Italy is complete without gelato? We head down to the check out the sights, keeping an eye out for a promising gelato stop. This is what we settled on:

Of course, I had to get a picture of the professors at the Caffe del Professore! It was good, but they didn’t have lemon. What a waste.

Across from the caffe was the Temple of Apollo. The oldest parts date from the sixth or seventh century BC. That’s not “Before Coffee” or “Before Chocolate”, that’s 2700 years ago folks.

The town of Siracusa is mostly done in the Baroque style because of an earthquake that leveled the city in 1693.

I don’t know what “Baroque” means, but I liked it. The buildings were so ornate and scrollwork was everywhere. The little street above was very typical of the streets that we saw in Siracusa. It made me laugh that all of the buildings on this tiny street had balconies. A cat could visit the different building without ever touching the ground!

It wouldn’t be a visit to an Italian town without seeing the local Duomo.

It was another masterpiece of the Baroque style. But I don’t really understand why the church is called “the Duomo”. I didn’t see a dome anywhere on that building.

The inside of the church was very unique. The church was built on the site of a temple to Athena that was started in 530 “Before Chianti”. Instead of razing the old temple, the builders incorporated the architecture and columns of the pagan temple into the church.

I really loved the atmosphere of this church. You could look around and see the contradiction of the Catholic Church and the old pagan temple. It kept the dimensions of the old temple and didn’t try to be too big. It was very cosy for such a grand structure.

In the loggia of the Duomo, there were a couple of sculptures. One in particular caught my eye:

Is that a flame coming out of his head? I have no clue who it is, but his head is on fire.

After touring the Duomo, it was getting time to head out. We, being Jim and I, were getting tired. It was hot and all I wanted to do was take a swim. I think that Leif could have kept walking around, but we outnumbered him. Plus Jim thought that we were running out of time on our parking meter and didn’t want to get a ticket. Sounds like a good excuse to me!

We walked back to the car along the coast. The city designers had built a promenade below the old city walls. It was tree lined and very cosy. There were a few kiddie ride set up and several food vendors. Thankfully, one of them had lemon gelato so I got my fix!

The tree lined promenade. We walked in the shade. It was still pretty hot.

Jim by an ENORMOUS tree. He’s holding up to the heat pretty well!

We got back to the car and still had plenty of time on the meter, so all was well. Our only hurdle was to get out of the city without:

• getting lost
• getting killed
• getting a ticket
• getting in an accident

Remember, we don’t have very good maps and the Swede in the passenger’s seat isn’t that good at reading maps. We felt confident as we started out, but didn’t take into account one way streets. It was the usual scene; Leif and I yelling directions, Jim getting mad because nothing we were saying made sense and he didn’t want to violate the four rules above.

We got funneled into some street that we weren’t sure that we wanted to be on but we came across a disaster of a traffic circle that we recognized from driving and we were good. Jim had to cut someone off to get on the right road, and so we got honked at but no one got:

• lost (just minorly diverted. I quickly found where we were on the map.)
• killed
• a ticket
• in an accident

So driving in Siracusa was a success, no thanks to Leif or I.

Time Warp!!

Let’s take a trip back in time to a few weeks and pretend that I’m still in Italy. It wasn’t that long ago, and with the help of the guide book, I still remember what all of the things are!

Before we saw lava (and really, what can hold up to lava?), we saw some other stuff in Sicily. Jim wanted to drive down to Siracusa, on the southeast tip of the island. Siracusa has quite a history! Because of it’s location, it was a stop on the trading routes throughout the Mediterranean and was quite wealthy. Now a days, it is a much quieter town and I think it is probably more known for the Mafia than anything else. I think I had a little run in with one of the local Mafia at lunch. I thought he was a waiter! But that’s a different story…

Siracusa is about 1.5 hours south of Catania, where our hotel was. We went with Leif, our friend from Sweden who was also down for the conference. It was a pretty easy drive until we got into Siracusa. We didn’t have great maps of the towns and it was an interesting time for Jim. Poor guy, he had a Swede who can’t read maps giving him directions in the front seat and me yelling corrections in the back seat.

Our plan was to go to the Neopolis in the Archeological Park first, and then walk south about 1.5-2 km through the city of Siracusa to the edge of the city that overlooks the Mediterranean. This way we could park outside the city center and not die.

The Neopolis was the city’s collection of altars, temples, theaters and other non-house type places. Our first stop was the old Roman Amphitheater.

The guidebook (Not Rick Steves’. Apparently he doesn’t think that Sicily is part of Italy and so doesn’t include it in his book.) says that at 140m long, it is one of the largest of its kind. Really? It didn’t look all that big to me. I guess the movie Gladiator has tainted my ideas of history.

Jim and Leif were thinking about staging their own combats. People would come from miles around to watch two scientists duke it out over who has the shortest laser pulse! Think of the glory!! You know, scientists can suck the fun out of any occasion.

I was amazed that some of the arches in the Amphitheater were still standing. I mean, our engineers can’t build a road that doesn’t crack in 6 months. These guys built arches that are still standing 2000 years later. Maybe we could learn something from them?

The main attraction of the Archeological Museum is the Greek Theater, which I didn’t take any pictures of. I take pictures of slugs and people I don’t know, but I can’t seem to get a photo of a large outdoor theater. Go figure.

I did take a pretty picture of the view from the top of the theater though:

The sea was so blue!

The top of the theater is lined with caves. There is an artificial grotto:

It was blazing hot, and I was thinking about swimming. It is fed by water from an ancient aquaduct. It isn’t clear if the grotto is from the ancient times, or just the water.

In one cave, there was a cool stone throne:

I tried to get someone to sit in it, but it was covered in moss and slimy stuff.

There was also a “Cave of the Scientists”:

As I said, it was really hot. We spent a lot of time in the caves, just cooling off.

A lot of rock was quarried from this area to build Siracusa. Rock takes up a lot of space and most of the time they don’t get filled in when the rock is exhausted. The left over pits are called the “Pits of Paradise”.

I’m pretty sure the landscaping is a new thing because the pits were used as places to hold prisoners of war. But it wasn’t always a prison. At some point, a cave with some unique acoustical properties was gouged from the side of the pit walls.

It is 20m tall and extends about 65m back. It is man made, too. I didn’t believe it at first, but you can see the gouge marks in the walls. I tried to get pictures, but the didn’t turn out too well. There are also peg marks in the wall that look like anchors for stairs. This begs the question: how do you think they dug out the cave? From the bottom to top, or top down?

There is also a great big ruin in the Archeological Park:

The sign said that it was the “Ara di Ierone II”. Great descriptive name huh? It wasn’t until I was reading the guidebook on the way back to the hotel that I found out that this was an ALTAR. Not a temple, but an altar. It was dedicated to Zeus and some historian records that 450 bulls were slaughtered there at a time. Wow.

Time for some more baby pictures!!

Baby Lemon Gelatos.

Next up, pictures from the town of Siracusa!

Earthquakes and volcanoes make for good wine…

Sometimes, it is really cool being a scientist. Especially when you are invited to talk at a meeting at a resort in Sicily. Of course, I would never know this. But it is fun being married to such a scientist!

Our last bit of work in Italy is a conference. Well, Jim’s last bit of work. I’m relaxing by the pool most of the time. When Jim was invited to talk at a conference in Sicily at the end of June, of course he accepted. It was just fortuitous that we would be in Italy already.

We flew down from Florence on Monday afternoon and arrived in Catania airport. We decided to be a little crazy and rented a car. The talks didn’t start until Thursday morning, so we had to have some way to get around the island!

The island is a beautiful place. It reminds me a lot of Hawaii. Same arid landscapes, volcano in the background…

Etna dominates the landscape on the eastern coast. She is still active and you can see the smoke that she is giving off. She erupted in May of 2008 and has been pretty active since then. They have had over 200 minor earthquakes and smaller eruptions in the past month. Great. I don’t like visiting California because I’m afraid it will fall into the ocean while I am there. Now I have to worry about volcanos in Sicily.

Driving in Sicily has been a little more hair raising than in Tuscany. In Tuscany, people honk their horns to let you know that they are behind you, and only occasionally in anger. The drivers are much more aggressive here. A friend said that driving was the worst in Naples and slowly tapered off the further away you got. We are pretty close to Naples. ‘Nuff said. (Actually, his analogy was much more scientific and geeky. I decided not to bore you with that.)

We made it to the hotel with only a minor difficulty. The sign to the hotel was facing the wrong way. It makes it difficult to know where to turn when you can’t see the signs! The hotel is gorgeous and definitely a resort.

We are on the other side of the hotel, which is OK with us. No sun in the morning.

The pool is saltwater, which is kind of fun. You float a lot better in salt water than in fresh water. Even cooler, it is an infinity pool:

I think they should have painted the pool a deeper blue though. It would have made the effect more convincing. Not that I’m complaining or anything.

The hotel has a great restaurant, right on the water. We ate at the hotel that night and watched the moon come up. It was about 2 days off of being full and lit the coast line up.

Unfortunately, the waiters have recommended international style wines every night. We haven’t been able to convince them that we don’t want an oaky white wine. We want to taste Sicily!

But as beautiful as the scenery is, the hotel room is pretty uncomfortable. It is pretty typical in Italy, that the windows have an interlock that shut the AC off if the window is open. Well, we didn’t know this the first night and spent a pretty warm evening trying to sleep on a slab of granite that they call a bed. We figured out the AC problem early in the morning, but have decided that the hotel shuts the AC off from about midnight to 6AM. (Have I made you feel sorry for us yet?)

But somehow, we have managed to survive.

Old stuff, REALLY old stuff.

A couple of weeks ago, Jim and I made a list of things that we still wanted to see in and around Florence. We didn’t want to be in Florence on our last day and realize that there were still six museums still to see but we couldn’t do anything because we had to pack and get everything ready to leave. The list was pretty short. We had been pretty good about making sure we got out every weekend and did something in the area.

Among other things, there were couple of churches on the list. We went to one of the churches and then realized that they were all starting to blend together. Yeah, we have pictures and I’ve been captioning the photos in iPhoto, so in a year I’ll actually know what they are, but really, how many Annunciation of Mary’s can you look at and really appreciate? So we struck the rest of the museums off the list and focused on the rest of it.

The one place that was left was the Fiesole Archeological Park. Fiesole is a small town up on a hill overlooking Florence. The Park is in the guide book, but Rick doesn’t have too many great things to say about it. He implies that it’s overpriced and because few of the signs are in English, not worth the trip. We had run through most everything else in the book and like looking at old things so wanted to give it a try. To get to Fiesole, you take the bus. We just missed one and had to wait for the next.

What’s better when you are waiting than a nice gelato?

Frutti di Bosco is Jim’s favorite. This was pretty good with chunks of berries mixed in. My favorite is Lemon and Strawberry, mixed. YUM!! But when you are done with your gelato, you might need these:

Thankfully, before we could make that impulse buy, the bus to Fiesole showed up. Off to the Archeological Park. Rick, I respectfully disagree with your assessment of it. After four months of churches and other religious sites, this was a nice break.

The ancient Romans LOVED Fiesole. It catches the nice cooling breezes during the summer and has wonderful views of the countryside. The whole area is littered with ruins and it seems like every time they dig they unearth more ruins.

Fiesole is the site of one of the best preserved Roman Amphitheaters. They still use it for performances today. They had a stage set up for performances later in the month.

I couldn’t get over the shape it was in! The seats were all smooth and able to be used. I’ve seen other theaters like this where they have to lay wood over the seating areas because the stones are so broken up. The stairs were all usable and safe.

You know those crazy Romans though:

A play isn’t a play unless someone is throwing up!

There are other well preserved ruins in the park too.

I just liked these columns. I don’t know what they were part of.

There was a huge excavation of Roman Baths:

The three arches were very cool. I’m amazed that they stayed up for 1700 years.

The tower is the bell tower that is associated with the cathedral in Fiesole.

There is also an Etruscan/Roman temple that has been uncovered:

Part of the structure dates to the Etruscans and the rest to the Romans. It seems like the Romans used a lot of the Etruscan buildings when they were constructing temples and their houses. Everything is mingled together and it’s hard to tell the different between the two sometimes. (At least for me. I’m sure historians have it all straight in their head.)

There were several stone-lined pits in the ground:

Jim and I think they were graves. They are about the right size for the people of the time. But there wasn’t a lot of information available, either in Italian or English. In the picture of the temple, you can see the guide that tell you what each of the structures are. That was in Italian, English and Braille… Yeah, I don’t get that last part. There was a brief description in Italian that gave some context of the site, but we didn’t spend too much time trying to figure it all out. It was a beautiful day and just nice to walk around and soak in the sights.

The park also included a museum that showed artifacts that had been dug up in the area. I was really amazed at the size of the of the museum. It was enormous. The building had been built around some of the ruins on the site.

There was even a little spring running through the building! I thought it was very cool how they tried to respect the land and the culture of the site. The building was not situated in a rectangular layout. It would have been very easy to get lost in there!

They had an exhibition of one of the graves that was found in 1989. They brought everything to the museum and set it up like they had found it.

The blue glass at the bottom was found in the grave along with the skeleton. It was still intact. There was a very pretty decoration of white swirling along the drinking edge. It was amazing to think that it was over a 1000 years old.

They had a large collection of pottery that had been donated by a local Professor about 20 years ago. One of the panels was discussing how they had analyzed the glazes used on the pottery:

FTIR!! Bonus points to anyone who can name the functional groups in the glaze!

We really enjoyed the visit to the park and would recommend it to people who are tired of looking at churches, walking past art and getting jostled by a million other tourists. There were only about six other people at the park at the same time we were there. If the lack of information bothered you, there were books available in the gift shop that had some explanations of specific items. We didn’t mind just walking through and admiring the artifacts though. Who really takes the time and reads all that stuff anyway?