whitehall

We hiked up the less travelled path to Castelmola, perched high above Taormina and the coastline to the south. There are sweeping views of Mt. Etna before you come to Chiesa San Bagio, the area’s first church, that was built after a Saint’s arrival in 40 AD. Near the top, there is a tiny view platform now overgrown with a giant mulberry tree. Another day with perfect weather, and we saw only three other hikers on the way up, despite a very crowded Taormina below.

adlmllr

how long did it take to hike up to Castelmola, and did you also hike down?

whitehall

Quote:

Originally Posted by adlmllr

how long did it take to hike up to Castelmola, and did you also hike down?

The hike up took about 45 minutes. We did hike back but a different way. We will try to post photos of Castelmola itself later today (we are out of town for a couple of days) and details of the hike back tomorrow. The return included some roadway but then a series of stairs and a church worth visiting.

whitehall

Brightly colored shops, restaurants and castle ruins on a hilltop overlooking the sea. Castelmola is at once one of the true near perfect gems of Sicily, but, at the same time slightly surprising, thanks to one restaurant owner who made the penis an extra attraction almost 50 years ago. That's the theme of their two eateries, right outside the town’s duomo. It is not only the defining symbol of these two phallic places, but it has been adopted, to a lesser degree, by other shops as a souvenir of the beautiful hilltop village.

Our favorite place is the landmark Antico Caffe San Giorgio, where every patron is served their tasty almond wine. There are multiple dining areas, all gorgeous, on several floors, with spectacular views of Taormina. We tried two dining areas during our short visit, one for granita and brioche and one for lunch.

Adelaidean

A sight for sore eyes

I couldn’t walk past a trattoria with those geraniums on the deck. Such a joyful colourful space.

whitehall

A different hike back to Taormina from Castelmola included some roadway (the way most people take their tour buses and taxis to get to Castelmola) and then lots of manicured stairs past the closed castle grounds and by the striking Chiesa Madonna della Rocca.

adlmllr

gorgeous photos! a few years ago, we stayed at Villa Ducale and used those stairs to walk down to the main street in Taormina, stopping in the Madonna della Rocca, which we loved.
In October, we'll be in Taormina for a couple of nights and will have a car this time, so perhaps we'll take the easy way and drive up to Castelmola

whitehall

Taormina is clearly the people’s favorite village in all of Sicily. We posted stuff on Facebook during our trip, and the most likes, by far, were for the Taormina photos.

Many years ago, we bought a house that had been owned, as a summer home, by the great grandson of a famous and wealthy business magnate. He left behind his personal papers that included lease agreements from the early 1950’s for a villa in Taormina. That included collection notices for the unpaid $80/month seasonal rent. We asked our landlords to help us find Villa Rocca Forte, and, in true Italian fashion, these life-long residents of Taormina checked with everyone they knew. No one had ever heard of the place. After giving up, just before our trip, they proudly announced success. Turns out this is still a villa that has seen better days but is next door to another one that is so big it is now a multi-star hotel. Many other villas are also now hotels.

Taormina is full of of color, including colorful people. Gorgeous flowers. Weddings. Of course, crowds, because it won’t be the favorite place without them. A great month. Until next time.



Villa Rocca Forte

thursdaysd

Lovely photos! But still, my favorites were Ortygia and Erice. Wish I had made it back...

bon_voyage

Whitehall, thank you once more for taking us along on this epic journey! I recognized the Villa Carlotta in this last set of photos with its profusion of purple flowers out front, the first hotel of our trip and my husband’s favorite.

whitehall

Sicily seems to have a love affair with the elevated roadway. We are all used to elevated roads and highways. Some of them are simply bridges that usually span rivers; others were constructed as ways to navigate traffic in congested areas. In Sicily, there are the urban ones too, but more often, they are a rural method to avoid impacting the fields and old roads below. One stretch, through the rural midsection, put us on an autostrade that went dozens of miles on an elevated roadway.

whitehall

Quote:

Originally Posted by thursdaysd

Lovely photos! But still, my favorites were Ortygia and Erice. Wish I had made it back...

thursdaysd Ortigia and Erice should be on anyone’s top five list. If we made it 10, we would add: Cefalu, Taormina, Castelmola, Castelbuono, Castellammare del Golfo, Ragusa Ibla, Modica, and Lipari. Maybe runners-up would be Agrigento (which is often overlooked with focus on Valley of the Temples) and tiny Savoca (before and after the tour buses).

Quote:

Originally Posted by bon_voyage

Whitehall, thank you once more for taking us along on this epic journey! I recognized the Villa Carlotta in this last set of photos with its profusion of purple flowers out front, the first hotel of our trip and my husband’s favorite.

bon_voyage Thank you. Villa Carlotta turned out to be literally next door to the villa we were looking for. The hotel looks bigger and grander than even its almost 30 mostly over-sized rooms, suites and apartments, but it’s remarkable that this massive place was a “local aristocrat’s” private villa in 1860.

whitehall

For fear of generalizing and offending anyone, I will refrain from answering this question with a stereotype like “in the kitchen, of course.” However gender equality in Sicily is said to have improved at a much slower pace than, in say, the US.

I haven’t counted, but we probably took close to 10,000 photos on our trip through Sicily. I took one that was of a group of young women on the streets of Lipari (bridesmaids). But we don’t recall seeing any other groups of women.

We first noticed large numbers of men gathered in town squares on our first trip to Italy 20 plus years ago. We commented that we saw little of it in Umbria during our month there last September, possibly due to Covid fall-out. These photographs aren’t great; we didn’t want to be too invasive. But when we pointed our camera at groups of locals, males are what we got.

adlmllr

we refer to these men as "the committee" and love to see them in towns all across Italy. the closest equivalent we have at home is the guys who meet and hang out at a local pastry/gourmet shop.

whitehall

We came to Sicily via Rome, and I apologize for digressing. The flight back to Rome offered some good aerial photo opportunities, some thoughts and memories. First a memory from 2008.

November 2008


We were disappointed that we weren’t sitting on the left side of the plane this time, recalling the views of Mt. Etna and Taormina we got the last time we flew from Catania in November 2008. The snow had mostly melted this time, but, from the right side of the plane, we got mostly a sea view from Sicily. Shortly after take-off, we observed a very long sand beach. We didn’t see it on the ground, and we don’t usually prioritize the beaches. However, we were surprised at its size, not realizing Catania was also a beach town.



We did spend a few days five years ago in a largely off the radar Italian beach town, Sperlonga, which we also spotted from the plane. We were there in the fall, still 80 degrees, and the Romans, who usually populate the place in the summer, were gone. What we liked was the lack, at least at that time, of all the beach umbrella concessions and just the ability to take a long, long beach walk with no one else around.


Sperlonga


Sperlonga

We also passed over another beautiful place that tourists miss. Gaeta, another favorite of ours..


Gaeta in foreground


Gaeta

Before that, we flew over an interesting looking island, and had to look at google earth to realize that this was Procida, one of the places we had to cancel due to Covid. Still need to get there.


Procida island with Naples on top

And I show this last photo of this agricultural land near Rome, on the approach to FCO airport, simply because I am shocked by the sharpness of this pic taken through the usually thick, scratched and dirty airplane window.

whitehall

Quote:

Originally Posted by adlmllr

we refer to these men as "the committee" and love to see them in towns all across Italy. the closest equivalent we have at home is the guys who meet and hang out at a local pastry/gourmet shop.

Just caught up with Stanley Tucci’s latest season. In Umbria, he featured a ladies squad of boar hunters, which I missed in my trip report last fall. A good sign of some gender equality there.

whitehall

As I indicated earlier, many people from the US visit Sicily via Rome. Flights booked to Sicily from the US can be almost double the cost of going to Rome. And, airlines like Ryan Air, even with baggage surcharges, are still quite cheap. We also love Rome, despite its litter and trash issues and crowds. The contrast between luxury and trash hit us when we looked at this exclusive Ferrari dealership, with signs outside prohibiting photos. Just a few feet away were overflowing dumpsters and lots of litter.


We still needed Covid tests to return in May, and Rome still had tents near many pharmacies with quick results.




A lot of people were still wearing masks in Sicily, especially indoors, even though the rules were relaxed shortly after our arrival. In fashion-oriented Rome, we saw one shop that sold masks to match their beautiful shirts. They had matching ones for a father and son. And price tags in the hundreds of euros. We didn't see anyone wearing a mask that coordinated with their shirt, but I wanted one.



I think Sicily had more grand chandeliers, many of Venetian Murano glass, in their churches than anywhere else we have been. But one of our favorite chandeliers of the trip was this one in a coffee shop in Rome.





A signifiant Fedex style delivery service in Italy is the sustainable company BRT. They claim to be a carbon neutral international shipping company, thanks to offset projects in India and Brazil. We watched them bring trucks to areas outside the center core and off-load them to these electric bikes for deliveries within the Rome city center. One of the odd, but cool, things they do is they have devices on board that measure air quality in the places they go, and they share that info with local governments.





Late afternoon/early evening is the time to see an empty Vatican square. But just a few feet away, the homeless re-open their nightly encampments, and there are signs of the garbage left behind from all the daily crowds. We did check the next morning, before we flew home, and all that trash that littered the entire street leading to the square was thankfully cleaned up overnight.


And we had to finish our trip with pizza and gelato, our favorites. We looked at the pizza scene before settling into our favorite regular spot. One of the new places we noticed is a new European chain. We know there are Domino’s all over Italy and don’t know how they are doing. But the colorful Crazy Pizza is a new entry as part of the rejuvenation of the once famous Via Veneto area from the "La Dolce Vita" era. This joint comes from the Billionaire Life Portfolio, founded in Porto Cervo, Sardinia, and now in other high end areas of Europe. The brand promotes indulgent living in eating and hospitality, and I guess billionaires like pizza too. Besides being an empty lunch destination, it looked like normal Italian pizza at non surprisingly high prices.





And buzz creates gelato places everyone needs to try. We used to be the only customer at one of our favorites in Rome, Frigidarium, but this trip every time we went by, we saw long lines. We assume someone updated an article on them. We did a quick google search and yes, the latest "48 hours in Rome" piece includes a stop there. We went to two other places that are just as good, and with no other customers, Gelateria del Teatro and Il Gelato San Crispino.






And, we often go to Giolitti, where they know how to move the lines with great gelato and some added glitz. Not always the friendliest place in town. Make sure you stand in line for the cashier and prep-pay before you select a flavor or they will yell at you. One good thing, you don’t have to ask for panna (whipped cream on top), they ask you. Outside, you aren’t allowed to sit at their tables unless you pay a higher price and use their wait staff. So, their customers resort to sitting on posts that can be dropped in the ground by a vehicle with a remote device that allows passage to restricted areas. What a surprise these gelato consumers would get if someone hit the remote!

thursdaysd

That is one cool chandelier!

nonconformist2

This looks amazing! I'm hopefully doing Sicily next year, but via a guided tour