Sicily



MONDAY, April 24, 1995.

After thinking about it for months, I'm finally here in Sicily. Thursday morning I took one last look around Verona while my laundry was being done (at an absolutely no problem to find drop-off laundromat with two hour service - what a concept!) before heading to the Verona! airport - I'd figured I'd have to fly out of Milan. I decided to fly because I wasn't ready for another marathon train ride down the entire length of Italy after the brutal trip from Pamplona. After landing in Catania, I rode a bus to Taormina with a friendly German couple. Taormina is perched atop a cliff overlooking the sea separating Sicily from the mainland. I was impressed with the bus driver's ability to navigate the switch backs. He'd let out several warning honks and then swing the bus way out and around, just squeezing his way through each hairpin.

From my room in the Pensione Svizzera (indeed, the place was Swissly clean and orderly), I had a cliff side view. At night, I could see the lights of the mainland faintly in the distance. My first night there, I headed just a few steps down the road to a little trattoria to grab some dinner. I ate my plate of spaghetti while eavesdropping. Two fifty-something American men were chatting with two fifty-something English women at the next table about their travels. I would've had my money on them all leaving together until one of the guys started talking about his wife and daughter. They left separately.

When I woke up on Friday morning, it was overcast and I let out a big, frustrated sigh. At breakfast in the hotel, I saw those same fifty-something American guys again and did some more eavesdropping. Hoping for the best, I headed out to explore the town. At around 10:30, the clouds were just starting to break and I found myself riding the funicular down to the beach to check it out. The weather steadily improved. After a good ten minutes of indecision, I rented a beach chair and sat there in my jeans, T-shirt, and unbuttoned flannel long-sleeve shirt. Slowly my clothes came off until I was laying out in my Hanes with my flannel shirt draped across my waist. Suddenly, it was hot and sunny. The weather was beautiful, the sea, the landscape and sky were beautiful, and the topless sunbathers were beautiful too. Finally, I decided I was being ridiculous and headed up to the hotel to put on my bathing suit.

On my way in, I passed some Americans my age on their way out. I asked them if they were going to the beach. They were. I told them that I'd see them down there in a few minutes. In fact, I caught up with them waiting for the funicular back down. And so I met Laura, Michelle, Melanie, and Aden (a guy). They were all from the east coast, attending east coast schools, and made fun and easy company. I must say, I highly recommend spending an afternoon laying out on the beach in Taormina chatting with a smart, good-looking American woman in a bikini. Michelle and I chatted it up. Laura and Melanie were silent sun worshippers. Aden was generally aloof, though we did talk some about our travels, and, uh, computers. They're all studying together in Florence and have been doing their share of traveling. Get this! They'd been to Munich and knew about the accordion guy! It was very validating to know that other people were blown away by this guy, too.

The two fifty-something American guys showed up on the beach. I decided to go say something to them.

"Sure is a small town."

They looked at me a bit puzzled.

"I saw you guys in the restaurant last night, at breakfast this morning, and now here on the beach."

"Oh, yeah, I thought you looked familiar," one of them said.

They said they'd noticed me smiling at some of their stories at the restaurant so I admitted that I'd been eavesdropping. They told me a bit about themselves and their trip and were surprised by how many of their sentences I was able to finish for them.

"You really were eavesdropping," they said.

Guilty as charged.

The younger Americans and I hung on the beach until about 4:30, then headed up for showers before dinner. Naturally, I'd be ready before the four of them ran through one shower, so I told them to come get me when they were ready. And they did. Cool.

We wandered around looking at restaurants before finally deciding on no place special. I had a "pizza Sicilia" which was nothing like the rectangular, thick-crusted stuff we used to call Sicilian Pizza back in New Jersey. It was a normal, round, flat, individual-sized pizza with capers, anchovies and no cheese. I didn't like it. I don't really like capers, and these weren't the fresh tasty anchovies I'd had in Spain. Still, nothing could be as vile as the anchovy, double garlic pizza that Steve Benton ordered at "HoloDinner" one night at Bertucci's in Boston. While we were sitting around talking, Melanie ran back to the hotel to get her forgotten AMEX card. When she came back, she had a telephone message for me. It said to call Gina and gave a number. This was puzzling because no one even knew where I was staying, not to mention that I don't have any friends named Gina. It was intriguing. Everyone teased me that it must be some woman who'd spotted me on the beach. I called and got a recording that the number was invalid. It's still a mystery. After dinner we went to a Karaoke bar where, after browsing the song menu and listening to a half-dozen cheesy Italian pop songs, we discovered that the bar did not have the English song discs.

Photos of Taormina

Saturday was pretty much a repeat. We all had breakfast together and spent another beautiful day on the beach. Mid-afternoon, deciding that we'd maxed out on sun exposure, Michelle, Laura and I moved into the shade with some ice-cream and talked about relationships. I got to hear some juicy, inside "girl-talk." I heard all about their boyfriends and about how they're sure that 95% of men cheat on their girlfriends. I also learned about how men are endearing despite all their faults. I suppose the same could be said about women. Around 4, we all headed back up to the hotel. I showered and dressed for dinner and promptly fell into a deep sleep. Melanie called, woke me, and told me to come down for dinner about two perfect napping hours later. We ate at a restaurant with an eager to please but bad at it German waitress. My spaghetti with olive oil, garlic and red pepper was tasty. Back at the hotel, we all went into their room. They'd been talking about needing to study for their Italian final on Monday, but we'd also been talking about massages.

Aden ignored us on the other side of the room with his beer and his hand-rolled cigarettes, apparently uninterested in massages that wouldn't lead to sex. First Melanie massaged Laura. Then she switched to Michelle. Laura hinted that she wouldn't mind some more, so I happily volunteered, eager for the opportunity to get my hands on her. She didn't like too hard of a massage which made it a little tough for me, but I found things she liked. Light finger massages on the neck and head even brought occasional verbal positive feedback. I massaged her for maybe twenty minutes. What I really wanted to do was kiss her neck, but how could I after hearing about her boyfriend and the misguided male soul? Finally, I decided to leave and go upstairs.

Sunday morning, we went to see the Greek theater. It was there that I said my good-byes, hoping to catch the 11:10 bus to Messina which turned out not to run on Sundays. I sat in the fly-infested inside, drizzling outside, bus station cafe waiting for the 12:25 bus and finished The Sun Also Rises. It was fun to read about places I'd just been to and get into Hemingway's characters and dialogue, although I resented the anti-semitism. (of the author? of the characters?) From Messina, I took the train (I only had to wait about 20 minutes for it, though the train I took was a three and a half hour late 11 AM train - welcome to Sicily!) to Milazzo, and from Milazzo, a hydrofoil to Lipari in the Aeolian islands off the northern Sicilian coast. While waiting on the dock for my boat, I met a couple of girls from Slovenia. It was so embarrassing. I'd never heard of their country. Now I know that it's nestled between Italy, Austria and the former Yugoslavia. I must have been absent that day.


TUESDAY, April 25, 1995.

On Lipari, I hardly had beach weather (my luck had to run out sometime). It was cool and mostly cloudy. Sunday night, I was in bed early, tired from traveling and feeling warm, as if I was coming down with something. I woke up late on Monday morning after a good thirteen hours of sleep, feeling better. I rented a bike and rode the perimeter of the island in about three hours. It was a fun adventure. I didn't really know how far I was going to ride or what the terrain was going to be like. I didn't even have a road map. The mountain bike was too small and had crummy brakes but otherwise was decent enough. Along the way, I rode up and down plenty of hills and past plenty of gorgeous coastal vistas overlooking the stone monoliths jutting out of the sea and the neighboring islands. I also passed by the Obsidian mines which are a pale whitish color on the outside even though Obsidian is black. I even bought two small pieces of Obsidian. Oh, great! Six months without buying anything because of the weight and now I start buying rocks! At one point I was feeling bummed out about the weather, and then suddenly I realized, "Wow! I'm out biking around the perimeter of a little island off the coast of Sicily. This is great." I stopped taking it for granted and started having fun.

Photos of Lipari

Photos of Vulcano

On Monday afternoon, I went on an excursion to Vulcano on a boat full of smiling, laughing Germans and a couple from NY. If the island's name evokes thoughts of Dr. Spock, being there takes the image even further. The sulfuric, volcanic terrain is the ideal setting for a "Star Trek" episode. The overwhelming, disgusting odor (imagine contact lens enzymatic cleaner shoved up your nose) even smells like another world. There were a bunch of old people hanging out in a brownish, quietly bubbling, hot, sulfuric pond. I stuck my finger in and then smelled it. Grossed out, and wearing jeans, hiking boots, and a long sleeve shirt on a cool damp overcast evening I decided not to go for a dip, despite the encouraging crowd. It's like I was on a planet made of rotten hard boiled eggs.

Today it's pouring rain. This combined with the fact that I'm very low on cash and having trouble getting more (no AMEX office or friendly ATMs on the island) made me decide to be moving along. I feel like I really should be going to Palermo. It's the big city in Sicily that everyone's heard of and everyone's going to ask me about, but I've decided not to go. I just don't feel like the extra train hours before heading north again. Maybe next time. I took the hydrofoil back to Milazzo with the couple from NY. Turns out that they're both architects and that he just finished three months of working outside Lugano. What? Did I think I was the only American going to work in Switzerland? We shared a taxi from the port to the station. It cost me ten times more than the public bus would have, but the bus wasn't there waiting for us, it was raining cats and dogs, and we didn't want to miss the train to Naples.



Copyright 1997 by Bradley Edelman
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