18. Home

Saturday & Sunday, Oct 26th & 27th.  Today we headed home.  We have an early flight out of Catania so we had to have our bags packed and set out for the bellman by 3:45 AM.  They had a continental breakfast set out for us and then we were on the van headed to Catania airport by 4:40 AM.

Remember when I pointed out that there was smoke and steam coming out of one of the craters on Mt. Etna?  Well, Mt. Etna put on a farewell show for us by erupting.  Here is a photo that my brother-in-law Neal was able to take.  Looks like a blowtorch aimed at the sky.

And here are a couple of images I was able to download showing the eruption.

Luckily the winds blew all of the ash and smoke away from Catania so we had no problems departing on schedule.  Arrived in Rome on schedule only to find that our flight to Chicago was going to be about two hours late.  That meant we would probably miss our connecting flight from Chicago to Tampa and that's
exactly what happened.  American Airlines was on the ball and already had us booked on a flight first thing Sunday morning, had a hotel reservation set up for us, prepaid, and vouchers for dinner and breakfast. Having been up for over 24 hours we grabbed an early dinner and  called it an early night.  Sunday everything ran on schedule and we were home in the early afternoon.  It was a great trip and we would recommend it to anyone but it sure was nice to get home and sleep in our own bed.

I hope you have enjoyed this blog.  They are fun to do and this is now the third one I have done.

17. Taormina

Friday, Oct 26th.  Today is the last day of our tour and we will spend it touring the town of Taormina.  This town is very old having been used by the Sicels (or Siculi) during the Bronze Age before the Greeks arrived in 734 BC.  It is located on the east coast of Sicily about halfway between Messina and Catania. and, as is usual for Sicilian towns, is located on a hill overlooking the Ionian Sea at an elevation of about 250 meters (820 ft.).  During Greek and Roman times it was a walled city with a gate on the north end of town, the Messina gate, and a gate on the south side of town, the Syracuse gate.  It was an important town in Greek times and was where the Timoleon of Corinth first landed when he began his campaign to drive the Carthaginians out of eastern Sicily.  Taormina again played a conspicuous part during the wars of Sextus Pompeius in Sicily, and, from its strength as a fortress, was one of the principal points of the position which he took up in 36 BC, for defense against Octavian.  It became the scene also of a sea-fight between a part of the fleet of Octavian and that of Pompeius, which terminated in the defeat and almost total destruction of the former.  It seems to have been one of the few cities of Sicily that continued under the Roman Empire to be a place of some consideration. Its territory was noted for the excellence of its wine and produced also a kind of marble which seems to have been highly valued.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, Taormina continued as one of the more important towns of Sicily.  It was taken by the Arabs in 902 after a siege of two years.  Following two uprisings, the Arabs totally destroyed the town.  During their reign the Arabs built a fort on a hill 150 meters (500 ft.) above the town. Muslim rule of the town lasted until 1078, when it was captured by the Norman Count Roger I of Sicily.  After the fall of the Normans and of their heirs, the Hohenstaufen, Taormina followed the history of Sicily under the Angevins and then the Crown of Aragon.  In 1410 King Martin II of Sicily was elected here by the Sicilian Parliament.  Later Taormina was under Spanish rule, receiving the status of "city" in the 17th century.  In 1675 it was besieged and conquered by the French.  Starting from the 19th century Taormina became a popular tourist resort in the whole of Europe: people who visited Taormina include Oscar Wilde, Nicholas I of Russia, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Nietzsche (who here wrote his Also sprach Zarathustra), Richard Wagner and many others.  During the 20th century, famous residents and visitors  included D. H. Lawrence, Truman Capote, Icelandic writer Halldór Laxness, British writer Daphne Phelps,  Bertrand Russell, British writer Roald Dahl and Tennessee Williams.

Our hotel is the San Dominico Palace and it was originally a Dominican monastery   We are staying in the old part of the hotel and our room is one of the monk's rooms.  Here is a photo of the hall leading down to our room.

And here is a photo of the lobby.

You could tell that this place was old as the walls of our room must have been close to three feet thick.  Here is a photo of a small section of mural that was in the common area of the hotel.

Before we started on our tour of the town, we walked back to the patio for some photos.  Here we are walking down a path through the gardens.

And here is a view from the patio looking down on the bay and the town of Giardino Naxos.

Here is Pat and I getting our picture taken against this glorious background

And here is Chris and Neal, my sister and brother-in-law.

After the photos we went to the central courtyard of the hotel to await our guide.  While there, Neal and one of our fellow travelers had an impromptu dance.

We then headed out for our walking tour of the town.  First thing we came to was this small church which was the chapel for the monastery and of course was dedicated to St. Dominic de Guzman who founded the Order of Preachers more commonly called the Dominicans.

Here is a section of the original walls of the city.

Here is the gate at the north end of town, know as the Messina Gate as the road going north leads to Messina.

Here was are walking down the main street, Corso Umberto I.

Now we are in the Piazza Duomo which contains the main church of the town as well as this fountain.  The small horse on the pedestal is a water fountain and the locals were using it to refill their water bottles.  The statue on top of the fountain is the symbol of the town, a centaur which in this case takes on a female form with, instead of the usual four legs, two legs and two arms holding an orb and a scepter, the attributes of power.

Here is a close up of the statue.

And here is the Cathedral dedicated to St. Nicholas of Bari and dating back to the 13th century.  Its simple facade is ornamented by a Renaissance doorway flanked by two single-light windows with a rose-window above. The crenelations along the roof line have earned it the name of “cathedral-fortress”.  The interior is Gothic  the plan is a Latin cross; the nave is separated from the side-aisles by an arcade of pointed arches. These spring from column shafts of pink marble. The clerestory above comprises simple one-light windows that light the nave.

Here is the main altar.

And here are two of the side altars.

We then proceeded through the town.  The building on the left is the Municipio or town hall.

Here is a better photo of it.  What is interesting here is that before this building was erected, this was the site of a Jewish temple before the Jews were driven out of the town.  When the architect was designing this building he took one of the Star of David ornaments from the temple and embedded it in the wall of the municipio just above the main entrance.

Some of the side streets are very narrow as you can see in this photo.

This is a tourist town and so there were a lot shops catering to tourists.

But the locals still need to east so here is the alley with the produce markets.

Lots of tourist shops.

Here is a photo up a side street, if you look to the top of the hill in the background you can see the walls of the fort that the Arabs built back in about 1,000 AD.

We are in the Piazza IX Aprile and the photo shows the former church of St. Augustine which was built in the in the 15th century and serves as the public library for the town.

More tourist shops.

Now we are in the Piazza Badia and this is the church of St. Catherine of Alexandria.  This church was built in the 16th century, partly on the ruins of the Odeon which was a small Greek theater.  The next photo shows the detail above the doorway.

Right next to the church is the Palazzo Corvaja which was built by the Arabs in the 10th century then owned by the Corvaja family from 1538 to 1945.  Today it is used by the tourist office.

As we leave the Piazza, the road splits with the right going down to the lower part of the town.  Ahead is the main road and more tourist shops.

We've now come to the end of the old town.  Just ahead is the southern gate of the town know as the Syracuse Gate and the road form here takes you to Syracuse.

After we finished touring the town we walked to the outskirts of town to see the Greek/Roman theater.  This theater is one of the most famous in the world and dates to the 7th century BC.  The original theater as built by the Greeks didn't have the walls and columns that you can see in this photo, these were added by the Romans after they conquered Sicily.  A lot of the stone seats for the audience are gone as the locals viewed them as a great source of building material.  This theater is still used and various concerts and performance are put on in this theater.  While we were there, a crew was in the process of dismantling and removing equipment from a recent performance.

Here is a closer photo of the walls that the Romans installed.

Here is a closer view of the stage area.

And here is a panorama shot that I put together showing the theater,

And finally here is a photo I took from the theater showing the town of Taormina with Mt. Etna in the background.

This finished up our tour.  We grabbed a late lunch and then did some shopping.  This evening we had a final reception and dinner on the hotel terrace.  Here is a photo I took of the lights of the town.

Tomorrow we head home.

16. Mt. Etna

Thursday, Oct 24th.  We're headed to Mt. Etna, then a winery tour and then Taormina where we will spend the last day of our tour.  As we head down the autostrada, we can see Mt Etna in the distance as in this photo.

Our tour guide, Nicole, kept us informed, educated and entertained as we headed to our next stop.  Here she is this morning talking to us about what to expect when we get to the volcano.

The entertainment consisted of jokes and music, music like this Sicilian donkey song that we would do almost anything to not hear again: Sicilian Donkey Song.  Don't know if this the same one but it's close enough.

The gateway to Mt. Etna is the town of Nicolosi as they proudly announce on the arch leading into town.

And here is there church, no great edifice but very important to the town.

And here we are on the flanks of Mt. Etna.  Mt. Etna is what is know as a stratovolcano, that means that it is built up in layers over many years, in this case Etna started forming about 500,000 years ago off the ancient coastline of Sicily.  Western Sicily is not volcanic and was formed when limestone was forced up from the bottom of the Mediterranean millions of years ago.  As Mt. Etna grew it joined and greatly enlarged Sicily.  It sits on the subduction zone between the African plate and the Eurasian plate.  The United Nations' International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior has designated Mt. Etna as a Decade Volcano which means it is one of 16 world wide judged as being worthy of particular study in light of their history of large, destructive eruptions and proximity to populated areas.  It is the largest of the three active volcanoes in Italy and is about 2-1/2 times larger the Mt. Vesuvius.  It is the second largest in the European-North African region.  It is just under 11,000 feet high but the height varies depending on volcanic activity. 

It is not your typical volcano with a cone and a crater at the top.  It actually has five distinct craters at the top and more than 300 vents on its flanks ranging from small holes to caldera hundreds of meters across.  In fact, the locals don't worry much about the craters on the top as the eruptions that come from them don't bother them.  What they worry about is eruptions from the flanks as these are much closer to them and the lava that comes out of the flanks moves faster and goes farther then that from the peak.  If you look carefully, you can see steam coming from one of the top craters, remember that.

Surrounding Mt. Etna are many lava fields, here is a photo of one we got close to.

You can probably get this house pretty cheap as it was buried in a lava flow.

Here you can get and idea on the size of the lava fields and also see the cable car lift that takes you almost to the top.

Here is one of the hiking trails that you can take to see one of the craters on the flank.

Here is a relatively small crater.

Here is a larger crater.

Here is another small one but you can tell that it is more recent as they start out black and then lighten and turn red as the iron in the lava rusts.

Another view of the extensive lava fields.  Once again you can tell which are the more recent by their color.

The building in this photo is the Sapienza Refuge which is the main tourist area on this side of the volcano.  It has had to be rebuilt several times as the result of damage from lava flows.  It is also where you get the cable car that takes you closer to the summit.

More hiking trails and lava fields.

On our way down the mountain we came across these abandoned buildings.  The lava from the volcano makes very fertile ground for growing grapes and other produce but at the risk of being forced out by another lava flow.

After leaving Mt. Etna, we stopped at the Tenuta San Michele which is home to the Murgo Winery for lunch and a tour of the winery.  Here is a photo of us having lunch.  Great food and lots of it.  Pat has even gotten used to eating eggplant, seems like we had caponata at every meal (no complaints from me).

Here is our tour guide, Nicole, really enjoying a discussion with the restaurant operator.

Here is our winery guide.

Here are some large wine casks for aging what is know locally as Etna Rossa.

Here is our guide explaining the process of riddling to remove the sediment from sparkling wine.

When sparkling wines or champagnes were first produced, the wine had a cloudy appearance due to the yeast that was added to carbonate the wine.  In the early 1800s, Madame Nicole-Barbe Clicquot who owned Champagne Clicquot didn't like this so she developed a process where the wine was stored neck down as in riddling rack like this one.

The bottles are given a small shake and turned every couple of days.  After the sediment had a chance to settle in the neck of the bottle, the wine in the neck is quickly frozen by immersing only the neck in a very cold solution.  The bottle is then opened, the sediment plug removed and the bottle quickly resealed.  This process is basically unchanged 200 years later except now they use machines to jostle and turn the wine bottles instead of by hand.  Here is a large number of bottles of wine aging in the wine cellar.

Here is the machinery that puts the labels on the bottles.  This used to be done by hand but with production at this winery of about 20,000 bottles a year doing it by hand got pretty tedious.

As we drove to Taormina, here is another of those hillside towns that the Sicilians seem to love.

And here we are in Taormina checking into our hotel, The San Domenico Palace Hotel, which used to be a Dominican Monastery.

Tomorrow we will spend exploring Taormina.