Though it's Sicily's second largest city, it felt more city-like and bustling than did laid back, slowly crumbling Palermo. Our stay began with a family of an elderly mom, her son and their dog in an apartment building on the outskirts of the central city. We arrived around 10:00 and we're sat down on the balcony to begin our day with coffee and homemade carrot cake. Thus fortified we set out about our one real day of just exploring the city.
Though I never fell in love with Catania the way I did with Palermo, we still had a fun first day. Buying a kilo of cherries for lunch and sitting in a giant gazebo in the central park was one part of this. Then wandering almost at random through the city's west and stumbling across an area of three square blocks where everyone was either trying to find parking spots, buying red roses or selling red roses. Coupled with the fact that many of the women seemed to be dressed in nun costumes (nun costumes mind you, not actual nuns' habits) this was all very confusing. We eventually figured it out when we came across the church of Santa Rita, who, on her death bed requested a rose from her home town. Despite it being January, her followers tried to oblige and miraculously (she's a saint after all) found a bush in full blossom and were thus able to fulfil her dying wish. This was her feast day and everyone was coming to replicate the final offering made to Rita.
We also had a fun visit to the former monastery and the huge, never completed, church of San Nicolò l'Arena that now houses the University of Catania's faculty of literature. The partial church was no less imposing for being unfinished, but the gardens and galleries inside were bright and welcoming. Just across from the church, around the corner from the Piazza Dante (named after my Nephew) we popped into a Salumeria (a deli basically) for a grilled sausage sandwich. While waiting for that to cook the staff offered us some ground horse meat (a Catania specialty) to munch on. It wasn't bad. Very lean, only slightly gamey and well seasoned.
We came across castles and hamams and piazzas and cathedrals, alleys wandering alongside and ducking under the railway tracks through town, and several of the little rubber-tired mini trains that seem to be taking over tourist destinations throughout the old world. And near the very end the curious but charming elephant on a column in the moan Piazza that is Catania's symbol. In short, on our first day in Catania we got all of the (outdoor at least) tourist highlights of the city under our belts.
Next morning we went down to the rocky but pretty beach/fishing port near our Airbnb. While we were there several guys were training a golden retriever and two Labradors to act as water rescue dogs (actually I think one may have been already qualified and just brought along to show the almost comically incompetent other two how it was done). Going for a swim with these two was an fun but odd way to begin a day that would continue fun and odd late into the night.
A couple of months previously, in Cadiz, Spain, we'd met Gianluca, a Sicilian who'd convinced us to visit the island instead of central and northern Italy ("You can visit the north any time you're in Western Europe. But since you'll be in Tunisia it's the perfect chance to see Sicily too!"). He'd mentioned at the time that when we were proposing to visit was right around the time of his brother's wedding, which he'd be coming home for. And lo, there he was in Catania at the same time as us.
This was only partly due to good planning. It always seemed like making plans to meet with Gianluca took a long time and was unpredictable (fair enough, he had his brother's wedding to help with). But on the afternoon of out second day, Gianluca and one of his cousins, Fabio, met us under the gazebo in the central park. The plan (and this is where our Catania experiences start to get unusual) was for us to join them for his brother's stag so/bachelor party.
We set out to the costume district (Carnival in Catania is a fairly big deal and there actually was such a place) to peruse giant penis and condom costumes for bro, then went for a beer (slightly oxidised but pretty decent ESB out of a 750ml bottle from a Sicilian brewery) while we waited for the rest of the crew to be ready. We went to an uncle's house in the suburbs to meet the other dozen young men (a smattering of whom spoke some English) and then headed out still further to the flanks of Mt. Etna for the evening's first activity: paintball.
We got the safety briefing (in Italian, but I made sense of it, and it was all pretty commonsense anyway) and played several games with all of the non-drivers digging into beers from the car boots between games.
To put it bluntly, I suck at paintball. And my communication with teammates was never going to be the best. Indeed it's kind of a surprise that I only scored one "own goal". But everyone did have fun and by the time we were done it was almost dark.
Gianluca had some prep stuff to do, so he left us (and this sounds way worse than it is, in fact it was kind of fun) beside a row of dumpsters near to the dinner venue with two half litre beers while he sorted stuff out. When we finished our beers and he still wasn't back we simply headed to the restaurant and ordered another plus a litre of house wine. I suspect we didn't adequately explain to the staff what was up, but the lights came on when the rest of the group arrived (though it must still have been surprising that we were joining fifteen young Sicilian men plus one Spanish woman [another friend of Gianluca's]).
We'd clearly got the spirit of things right when we'd ordered the drinks. The rest of the dinner was basically plate after plate of meat being passed round the table (there was a salad and some fish for Sarah), including some really good sausages and lots more horse. And, of course, heaps more beer and jugs of wine and at the end a couple bottles of potent herbal spirit that the restaurant had gifted the groom.
Everyone stroggled (my own invented word that is a combination of sauntered and staggered) out into the night and a wineskin full of (was it grappa maybe?) produced. When the party began heading towards where Gianluca's car was parked to make an assault on the contents of the trunk we decided that discretion was the better part of valour (and of being a good guest too) and made our way home.
Not entirely surprisingly, the next day was kind of a write-off. Pretty much the only thing we did that's worth mentioning was to head out in the evening to collect a couple of pizzas (ala Norma, with the same ingredients as the pasta) and a calzone. These were good by NZ or Canada standards, but still not up there with Taverna Azurra in Palermo.
The following day was the wedding, so while Gianluca was busy with that, Sarah and I took a trip out of town to one of the main entrances to Mount Etna National Park. We took the single public bus of the day out there in the morning and went for a walk in the acceptable but grimmening (another word of mine, but one whose meaning is pretty obvious) weather.
By the time we'd walked up the pumice and lava rock to the top of the gondola it was raining and windy with pretty mediocre visibility, but we carried on a bit further to get us up 2800 of the mountain's 3300m. As we headed down the weather improved (which leads me to suspect that going up is why it got bad to begin with…) and the views out over the surrounding volcanic wasteland and further out over probably 25% of the whole island got better with it.
Exploring the cones and lava fields down closer to the road was fun too, and really reminiscent of the central North Island of New Zealand.
We got back to Catania in late afternoon and (despite our hostel moving us a few blocks away to a dumpier place for the same price) were tired enough to just call it a day and ready ourselves for the fun we had planned for Sunday.
This began with a walk through the northern suburbs of Catania which, though they didn't actually have much interesting to look at, did give us a chance to have an espresso at a little kiosk cafe in a park and another Sicilian food speciality, arencini (deep fried rice balls… we had one with mushroom and pancetta and another with cheesy pistachio filling).
Great way to line the stomach for a beer festival. We are constantly seeing posters for beer festivals that we'd just missed or were just missing, but in Catania we'd got it just right. For the first couple of hours it was pouring rain on the outdoor venue and Sarah and I were amongst the only people there. But we were befriended by two brewers from the little and little-known Italian region of Molise who collected us a table and tucked us in with a few other friends behind their stand. (And I'm not just saying this 'cause they were so nice to us, everything we tried from both of them, starting with session IPA and ending with Tripel, was great.)
Most of the smaller breweries' stands were staffed by members of the brewing teams and, especially after the weather cleared, I had an awesome time trying lots of beer and geeking out a bit. Everyone was exceptionally friendly and we ended up being gifted heaps of food and drink that led to us consuming more than we otherwise would have (and had the side effect of giving me a bit of an excuse for why I was skunked at foosball by two ten-year olds). Nonetheless we were home in bed by about 23:30.
Up and at 'em the next morning we said farewell to Catania and headed up the coast to Giardini Naxos, a charming little beach resort town where Gianluca's family live. On the way up we were in such a rush to catch our train (we arrived at the station with less than five minutes to buy tickets and get aboard) that I forgot to validate our tickets, which led to us being scolded and sold new (almost twice as expensive) ones by the conductor. I suppose it was nice of her not to charge us the €50 fine that she could/should have, but still was even that necessary? Like do they seriously have a need to crack down on obviously foreign tourists who are running some racket involving using unvalidated tickets and reselling them on the black market?
Anyway, my grumpiness at this was assuaged by the delightful folks from our delightful B&B picking us up at the station and taking us to their delightful place in the equally delightful town.
We actually didn't see Gianluca til late that night (when we sat on the balcony drinking some of his homebrew and a beer from the brewery he'd worked for in Spain). He was super (and unnecessarily) apologetic about not spending that much time with us, and ended up driving us around on a tour of the coast north of Catania the next day.
This included a trip to the incredibly cute holiday village of Mazzaro which sits perched between a beautiful little rocky beach and island below and towering cliffs that plunged down into the sea from above. After a walk round the beach and island in the bay below town we climbed up stairs and stairs and stairs and stairs to the top of the cliffs and the town of Taormina at their top.
Taormina is one of Sicily's tourism gems. Its streets of worn-smooth cobbles are lined with Renaissance residences, churches and even synagogues. It's got a fabulous Roman theatre as well. And it's jam packed with the tourists you'd expect in such a place. Perhaps in part because of this, my two favourite things about Taormina were slightly offbeat ones:
First: A replica of a midget submarine that a local hero of the Italian Tenth Flotilla Frogman Commandos (that's sort of a composite literal/figurative translation of the name) piloted in WWII when he planted limpet mines on several British warships in the Alexandria harbour.
Second: an English couple who had just got married and whose guests were mingling and sipping drinks from a bar that they'd set up in the town's central square. Meanwhile the bride and groom were having their photos taken, with their wedding photo shoot turning into a photo opportunity for hundreds of entirely unrelated tourists all around them, who in turn became the subject/background for several of the photos.
It was awesome to spend a good full day with Gianluca but come 16:00 we needed to be getting our train back to Palermo. We had a very tasty meal and some more of his personally supplied beer (and homemade Patxaran liqueur!) at a friend's restaurant before he dropped us off at the station and we said our second (but hopefully not final) farewell.
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