We sadly left Greece behind but we quickly got over it after we landed in Palermo, Sicily. We traded in our souvlaki for Sicilian pizza and moved up the ladder a bit on the wine scale. After a week driving through Sicily I feel I am qualified to face the eight lane round-about at the Arc de Triomphe. Beautiful island, friendly people, great food, fabulous wine, and an alphabet I can actually read! Highly recommended!
A common question when you go to Sicily is whether you ran into any mafioso and I’m happy to report that this was the extent of any mafia activity that we witnessed.
We logged quite a few kilometers in our Opel Corsa and were passed like we were standing still on several occasions even though we were cruising at 140 kph. Sicily is a mountainous island with a beautiful coastline. I”ll bet we went through over 100 tunnels between Palermo and Catania.
No shortage of churches in Palermo – The The Church of San Domenico (Saint Dominic) was right by our hotel
Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio Church in Palermo has one of the most impressive interiors I have ever seen. We attended a Sunday mass in Italian, Latin and Gregorian chanting all of which was lost on me because I was too busy taking in the beauty of the place.
If you zoom in a bit you’ll see that the entire interior except for the elaborately carved wood ceiling is made up of millions of individual mosaic tiles.
This mosaic is from the Cathedral in Monreale just outside of Palermo and it also had spectacular mosaics covering the entirety of the interior
Next stop – Cefalù – a quaint little seaside town with a large Norman church about an hour from Palermo.
The Cathedral-Basilica of Cefalù at night
Then it was on to Taormina perched high on a hill on the east coast of Sicily. The still in use ancient Greek Theater with original columns still standing is pictured here – quite the venue for a performance
The active volcano Mt. Etna at almost 11,000 feet dominates the skyline in Taormina and our next stop Catania. The volcano is in an almost constant state of eruption and can be seen venting at the left in this picture
Our next stop was Catania, the second largest city in Sicily and similar in size to Portand. It also has traffic issues like Portland but with drivers that don’t stay in their lanes, don’t stop for red lights or stop signs and motorcycles weaving in and out constantly. It would be suicidal to try and ride a bicycle in this traffic. Catania does have a beautiful historic city center and cathedral pictured here.
Syracuse was one of the day trips we made from Catania. Syracuse and much of southeastern Sicily was destroyed by a massive earthquake in 1693 and was rebuilt in a Sicilian Baroque style and has a huge cathedral similar in style to the one in Catania. Pictured here is the Fountain of Diana
The Syracuse Duomo
Our last stop in Sicily was Agrigento and the awesome archaeological site of the Valley of the Temples. I knew from our trip to Turkey that there were some outstanding ancient Greek sites outside of Greece but I was blown away by how intact some of the temples were in Agrigento. The huge bronze statue of Icarus was added in 2011 and was sculpted by Polish artist Igor Mitoraj who also has several sculptures at Pompei.
Temple of Heracles
This is part of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. It was the largest Doric temple ever constructed, although it was never completed and now lies in ruins.
This is a model of what the Olympian Zeus temple would have looked like. The ruin above is from one of the statues in between the columns.
Ruin of one of the statue figures from the Temple of Zeus Olympian. These statues were about 30 feet tall and looking at the model above you can see how huge this temple would have been.
Temple of the Dioscuri – the symbol of the city of Agrigento
Temple of Concordia at night