Magna Graeca

Our last morning in Scopello.......and well.....another beautiful sunrise and off to Selinunte.

Selinunte is another archaeological site, this one on the south coast and this one truly and totally Greek. A part of the Magna Graecia expansion of Greece along the south of Italy. We drove through truly wonderful Sicilian countryside full of vines and olive groves with a shallow descent from the mountains in the centre to the southern part of the island.

Selinunte is set by the sea on the hills between two rivers. It is quite an extensive site and I would have loved to have  my daughters, grandsons and Joel and Morgan chatting history and architecture with me. Instead I had Marjan just beaming at her surroundings saying "Wow!" a lot.

We started at the eastern temples, the main one of which, was controversially reconstructed from the materials on site in the late 1950's. Maybe controversial but so interesting to see and walk among.

We could walk, at least there were no signs forbidding it, right into the middle of the rubble, and we did.

It really was quite awesome. Anyway we walked to the western site, down hill and up hill, where there are more temples. These are surrounded by the city walls and the city stretches out behind it. Two major roads quartering the city and the others at regular intervals. we walked the street to the northern gate then along the inside of the eastern wall, checking out the small openings as we went.

The Selunites and the Segestans did not get on and got into various bits of bother, including at various stages Phoenicians, Athenians, Spartans, Carthaginians and any other thugs roaming the mid Mediterranean.

The walk back to the car was hot and sweaty.......have I mentioned the humidity?

SIDENOTE: The humidity.

It is really humid. So humid in fact that electronics seem to suffer. Marjan's phone just went all pale and pink. It has been recovering in a bag full of rice and seems to be getting better. My phone will not register touches on the screen half the time and then sometimes just goes and does what it wants for a while. My camera stops focusing at times and I have to take the battery out wipe it down and put it back in. It is really humid.

We have developed strategies: do not put phone in pocket; switch camera off after each shot; rest phone in sun to dry off; etc etc....but the google phone risotto is our favourite.

ENDSIDENOTE:

We were hungry and hot, and this is where some of Marjan's Sicily planning came in. We were not all that far from Da Vittorio in Porto Palo. It was mentioned as a great place to eat in a food/travel doco Marjan found. A mere half hour away. Let's go we said. So we put the coordinates into Jaime Lee and off we set..........now it was our navigation subsystem that was having humidity humpeties. First she suggested I drive into what looked like a gated driveway, when I refused she took me onto a main road off it and back to the gated driveway. This time it was Marjan who said "That's not a road", "See" said I. But Jaimie Lee insisted so in we went and yes it was a road and it even had a traffic light, the first we have seen outside the cities.

Anyway we drove in what appeared to be concentric loops over pot holed roads.....one pot hole would have eaten a smaller car.......surrounded by vines......until lo and behold we arrived at Porto Palo and found Da Vittorio by the water. Look it up. It was lunch time and we were ready . Our waiter took one look at us and said "Aqua con gas o naturale?" as he sat us by the window overlooking the Mediterranean surf. We were overwhelmed by the wine list, so just asked for a bottle of local dry white. "I'll take care of it!" he said.......which I immediately started regretting. We then spent a half hour eating bread and drinking water and sipping a wonderful local chardy....whilst arguing about how many courses we would have. I favoured 15 as there was so much yummy sounding stuff on the menu. In the end we settled for four - three and a salad. We shared some sardines.....divine.....we shared a tomato and seafood pasta.......equally divine....Marjan had a swordfish roulade and I had grilled tuna.......bloody wonderful. To top it off the waiter had not secured the only $400 bottle of chardy in Sicily. He had chosen a modest, by this place's wine list, bottle at $15 that suited the meal perfectly.

We were sated and happy and slightly tipsy with food and sun and stuff. So we jumped in the Mediterranean surf and paddled like great white Australian seals beaming and enjoying every bit of everything.

But we had to leave, we had a four PM appointment with a Sicilian in a black car at a petrol station in Monteallegro. His name apparently was Pino and he would find us. This is seriously how they do accommodation here. We thought that if we got kidnapped as part of this we had had a fine meal as our last.

Turned out Pino was fine and we followed his car as he drove using no indicators to a house on a hill overlooking the sea where Enza showed us through an immaculate little place with some local wine on the bench and some home grown veggies in the basket. Bliss.

A few postscripts:

1. Italian drivers are crazy......double lines, pass anyway...and then people make it three lanes to let them get away with it.
2. The lack of $ is palpable. We went into Monteallegro to buy some bits......bloody awful concrete housing, roads dug up and falling apart, light poles broken and hanging there.
3. The prices for a market shop item in Monteallegro are half Scopello. Less than half  for some items.
4. You cannot eat too much good seafood

A land of contrasts

Up with the sun again.......

Off to Erice, an old town on the top of a mountain.....well a 750m one anyway.......a bit higher than Mt Dandenong but rising straight from the sea and surveying all around it. The road up was steep and winding, but good quality with a bit of width at the corners and protection on the cliff side. Marjan did not think she was going to die, though she was trying to push a hole through the car floor.

Erice's history...nothing special...founded by Phoenicians and Elymians, Hellenised, destroyed in the first Punic war by the Carthaginians, conquered by the Arabs, the Normans, the Spaniards and then I lost interest. Suffice to say it reeks of history.

We got to the top well before the bus loads arrived, found a park just outside one of the old town gates and started walking. The car parking machines were broken....what luck. Absolutely amazing place, a bit misty though, as Mt Erice had decided to collect a cloud as a crown. We would get occasional glimpses of the Mediterranean through gaps in the buildings and/or clouds.

We bought a group ticket to do a few of the rides for an all-together price, sort of like Dreamworld only older. So essentially we wandered around, went in to some buildings and around others, made a mad dash back to the car park to find my phone still sitting on the roof of the car, checked out some amazing ceramics....if Erice were Mt Dandenong we would have a house full of gorgeous ceramics....and have a chicken one for Liz.

There is so much stuff packed into such a small area.......and not enough money to maintain it all as it could be.....a little like Sicily itself...….

Some of the churches were spectacular. I particularly liked the ceiling in San Martin.

We climbed the tower.....what is it with us.......and eventually ended up back in the car park.....now jam packed with people ........ I panicked.....the ticket machines were working.....I went to chat to the parking attendants...neither spoke English....my Italian though shone.....or at least managed to hold its own and they suggested I just drive off and they would forget all about it.....somebody was standing in my spot when I got to the car.....to reserve it, I almost ran over her toes to get out.

Down we went. Seemed easier once we cleared the fog........

We decided to look at a different, contrasting kind of history. A little place called Grotta Mangiapane......this is the history of the conquered rather than the conquerors who lived in Erice. A rural Sicilian village making do in a cave/cliff overhang. Occupied till after WWII the place reeks of poverty.

The hoity toity Greeks/Normans/Spaniards etc up in their hill towns, the locals huddling in a cave.....the gentle fog and breeze above, the scorching sun below.......hard to swallow for Sicilians being overrun by everybody under that harsh sun.

Anyway we found a beach......sort of ……..to have a picnic lunch......very late for us........and again the contrasts were astonishing......an amazing location, next to a quarry.......the blue Mediterranean edged by broken bottles and debris.

Back to Scopello where we visited the Tonnara, the old tuna station. Now private land,  it was gorgeous and too tempting not to risk the sea again. SO another swim, no Medusa.....in sea of cerulean blue....the water seems to be a velvet sheet holding you......by the way the salt level is so high you could not drown unless weighed down by several bricks. I tried diving and it was a struggle to get down about 7-8 feet. Lovely.

My Italian again held up well when the local grocer made a joke about me wanting carciofini when I was a big bloke and should have some carciofo. I got it and managed to smile and snaggle some tuna as well for our antipasto.....sort of like canned but nothing like canned......

By the way, what I am not sharing.....till now.....is that I believe Sicily could flood the world with parking attendants. Wherever you go someone has their hand out looking for a a parking fee. The consequence of this is that locals seem to park wherever they can manage to leave enough room on the road to squeeze a Fiat 500 through. Also entry to everything seems to cost money- toilets, churches, tuna stations, nature reserves, car parks. By the end of the day the wallet is considerably lighter.

Still, some of the town we went through today spoke of a pretty hard scrabble life.

By the way, Marjan wants me to be her parking attendant.

Heat and Humidity

It is a truth fervidly imagined that a Spanish man in possession of a large body must be in want of a drink.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering into Sicily, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding businesses, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their beverages.



But back to the beginning.....



Another glorious sunrise. I will not bore you with more sunrise photos. Here is one from our previous evening of romantic mosquito feeding.

We had a minor crisis. Marjan's phone appears to be giving up the ghost. It is our major local communication tool so we had to do a bit of swapping around. After a little googling we have the phone in a bowl of rice, in the hope it is a humidity thing......humidity is the theme.



After breakfast and a load of washing we were off to Segesta. Never heard of it? Well, it was a while ago. We are not 100% certain who founded the city. Well, they were the Elymian people, but were these people fugitive Trojans, runaway Phoenicians or just some local yokels with no proper Greek acknowledged heritage? We may never know. Soon enough though Greeks came along and helped out, as they do. There are some historical grounds for believing the Elymians got involved in some Athenian-Spartan negotiations. At any rate they managed to build a very Greek city on the top of a hill with walls protecting the more gentle slopes to keep uninvited guests at bay. The Agora is a bit of a mess, but the theater is lovely. There were walls that were described as a mosque and a Norman castle, both of which got destroyed by later folks,  Muslim and Christian. Down below is also a lovely Doric temple. Apparently it is important that it is 6 by 14 columns. You probably know enough now.....



The drive was relatively uneventful, though Italian drivers are interesting. I particularly love the guys who pass while having a wheel in my lane, also the guys who merge on the assumption that you are doing 180kph and will be well past by the time they push in. My favourite though was the guy flashing his lights and getting close to ramming me......the cause....I was doing the speed limit in a tunnel where he could not pass me.



We aimed to get there by opening time, we were about 15 minutes late, mostly because we arrived at the archaeological park site only to be told that parking was a mile away and cost $5 ....can't be bothered finding the euro sign......and we could get a bus into the park. So we did that only to arrive behind a bus full of Spaniards who had flooded the ticket office.......I mean seriously- busloads of tourists arrive and they have one man servicing the ticket office. Glorious location.

Anyway we got our tickets after a while and decided that main site (theater, Agora, church, castle) was the place to go. We also decided NOT to join the Spaniards in catching a bus up the 1.2K and 150m elevation to the site. Heat and humidity and bloody steep climbs.......we were both a bit red and dripping wet by the top. Whilst the blokes in the vineyard just kept working.

The Agora and the various buildings were mostly rubble and walls. The theater however was magnificent, with an awesome view behind out to the golfo.

There was an interesting hill with a couple of mansions on it and the autostrada tunnel through it. Marjan's theory is that the mansions belonged to the Mafia so rather than spoil their view they made the government tunnel under their hill.

We found a shady spot under the back of the theater and spent some time changing back to normal colours in company with some tour guides who had escaped their charges for a natter under the tree. They criticised my choice of apparel as the cause of my sweatiness rather than the heat and humidity...every one is a critic.

On the way back down the hill we were able to look around a little more to see the flowers and plants. The place is awash with herbs....wild rosemary, mint and a bunch of other aromatic stuff we did not recognise but which the snails loved.

We decided to reward ourselves after the walk up....and down.....with an ice cream......Marjan had sour cherry,  I had pistachio....pretty nice......they say Sicilian ice cream is the best......we are trying to prove that.



The temple was also lovely in an amazing setting. I found it interesting that quite a few people seemed to be taking their dogs for a walk around it. We ran into an American woman, and new Italian citizen, who took our picture. I offered to take hers and she immediately went into a yoga pose with one leg up in the air. People are strange.

Anyway back to our digs, via the supermarket, with a short test drive by Marjan.  We bought some more fruit- which by the way is very nice. Best peaches I have had in a while. We had a couple of sangers and Marjan read whilst I napped.



The weather was closing in, or at least becoming overcast, so we headed down for a swim before anything bad happened. We both enjoyed a swim but again hated walking on pebbles to get in and out.



I decided to go in for a second swim. This is where I could have titled this blog "A victim of global warming". I was paddling 50-100 metres off shore when I felt something on my chest, I was looking when I felt it across my neck and back......yes I was being eaten by a jelly fish. Apparently sightings are becoming more common in Italian waters and they believe it to be caused by global warming.....finally I believe it! I was obviously too juicy a morsel to pass up.



I swam out quickly and had visible welts. I wandered over to the life guards- yes the ones with the paddle boats-  a young non-english speaker assured me that there was nothing in the water. I could however have a shower to wash that nothing off, if I wished. As I reached for the handle he asked for a euro. As I walked away in disgust his older colleague noticed the welts and said "medusa" with an inquisitive look. "Sure" I said to which I got a shrug. Fucking tourists deserve it. No sympathy there.



Anyway we came back to our digs and checked the source of all knowledge and wisdom ...... google.....and tried its suggested solutions of a hot shower. Apparently I must now keep the welts under cover or could end up with darkened skin patches. Any one fancy a dalmatian, Spanish wello?



Once my life was out of danger, Marjan offered some comforting words "That'll teach you to go back for a second swim!"



On that note I leave you for another day on the road with Mrs Sympathy, who is currently quaffing bread and oil and a very nice Grillo. Can you quaff bread? My anxieties about jelly fish poison and stinging pain is as of nothing to a good G

rillo.