6. Lipari Last Day

Monday, Oct 14th.  Today is our last day on Lipari.  It is a beautiful island with a lot of interesting sites and things to do.  This morning we got a ride on the hotel van to the edge of the downtown area and then walked to the Anagrafe office in the Municipio.  This the Italian equivalent of the vital records section of a town hall.  It has all of the records of births, deaths and marriages in the town.  Unfortunately, the records that they had available for review only went back to 1820 so that limited what we could find but we did find some interesting information that I will add to my online genealogy information that I've posted on Ancestry.com.  We next went to the town cemetery to see if we could locate relevant Ziino graves.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of Ziino graves in this cemetery but we did find one that might be Grandpa's father.  Here is a photo of the marker.

You will note that there are no dates on the marker so there is no way to be positive that this is the correct grave without a lot more research that we did not have time for on this trip.  The graveyard is in a beautiful location just on the edge of town and over looking the Tyrrhenian Sea.

We then spent the rest of the day walking the oldest part of town.  There are two main roads running north and south through the center.  Here is a view up Via Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Today, the main business of Lipari is tourists.  There used to be pumice mining but a few years back the Aeolian Islands were declared World Heritage Sites by UNESCO and so the mining had to stop.  There is some fishing and farming but it is minimal.  The other main street is Corso Victorio Emmanuelle II and it is closed a lot of the time and limited to pedestrians.  Throughout the town and in fact the main residential "street" are what is known as vicolos (alleys).  Here are some photos of these vicos.

Supplies such as food, fuel, dry goods, etc. have to come in via ferry.  There are three kinds of ferries:  the hydrofoils or jet boats for people, the car ferries for passengers and their cars and the freight ferries for the trucks that haul in everything else.  Here are photos of the car ferry and the freight ferry.

One problem that Lipari has is that the only source of drinking water on the island is the rain that falls in the winter.  For years, cisterns were used to catch and save this rainwater for use during the rest of the year.  This is not adequate for today as tourists like to take showers every day, so Lipari imports its water from Sicily.  Here is a shot of a water tanker tied up at the docks.

Tomorrow we head back to Sicily and the town of Villafranca Tirrena where my maternal grandmother was born and raised.