A Trip to Sicily

A week and a half ago, I flew to the east coast of Sicily to see what was there. The plane arrived in Catania, the "other" major hub of Sicily, (Palermo being the one most of us probably think of first). I'd planned to take a bus directly to Siracusa, namesake of the American college basketball team that won the national championship a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, at the time the bus was scheduled to depart, a heavyset man with slick hair and glistening sunglasses strolled through the crowd at the bus stop and murmured, "Siracusa?" over and over in a low voice like a drug pusher in Washington Square Park. When enough of the passengers were paying attention, he then announced, in the same impassive tone, "No bus." No bus? Why no bus, demanded several irate passengers. "Problem," was the answer.

The next bus was an hour later, giving me ample opportunity to get to know the Catania airport, basically a giant shed which is being replaced by a glass cathedral next door, still under construction. After wilting in the shade of a giant rock for a while, I went back to the stop where there still wasn't any bus. Just as I was on the point of a nervous breakdown, it ambled up to the pavement, fifteen minutes late.

We were dropped off on an island called Ortygia, Siracusa's historic center, where the 17th century buildings are packed together in no discernible order, a bit like Venice without the canals. Most of the facades are crumbling apart, but that doesn't seem to bother anyone living on the island. I spent most of my first day wandering in the narrow alleys, eating delicious seafood, and visiting the Duomo, which is actually a Greek temple with a roof over it and a statue of the Virgin Mary where a statue of Athena used to stand. I also took a bike ride around the island and went for a swim at the local beach, a big rock underneath one of the battlements, from which people leap into the clear blue water. Unfortunately, many of the museums were closed or partially closed for renovations. This included the famous archeological museum, two-thirds of which was closed, though they were still charging the full price for a ticket. "Why is it closed?" demanded an indignant German tourist. "Problem," was the answer.

For dinner I went to a local trattoria and ate one of the most disgusting foods I have ever tasted: pasta with sardines, wild fennel, capers, and olives, a local specialty that I saw several other tourists enjoying. The waiters were very disappointed in me because I didn't manage to finish the whole heaping plate of the stuff. Afterward, I strolled to the main square, where in front of the city hall, embarrassed schoolchildren in togas performed Greek dances for a crowd of delighted parents toting handheld video cameras.

My next stop was Catania itself, a dark, bustling city of noisy, unfriendly people. I loved it, though I'm not sure it loved me. The architecture is high Sicilian baroque with lacy facades that warp and curve above wide boulevards with narrow sidewalks. In the markets, the vendors scream out their wares at passersby. I was bullied into buying a kilo of delicious fresh cherries by an ebullient grandmother with a set of lungs that would put Maria Callas to shame. Everyone in the city seemed to be the star of his or her own TV show.

And then there are the clothes. Having visited Catania, I now realize that Dolce and Gabbana are not fashion designers; they are documentary filmmakers who are simply reporting to the rest of the world how people dress on the streets of Catania. This particularly true of the men, who wear skin-tight T-shirts in day-glo colors (wearing bright pink doesn't make you any the less masculine in Catania) drizzled with gold, silver, and bronze paint, rhinestones, spangles, and extravagant stitching that matches the sparkling gel in their hair and their silver sunglasses and their gold and silver sneakers. Strutting around in their dizzying finery, they reminded me of giant lollipops. The next morning, I stopped by a clothes market and bought a few cheap silver-drizzled T-shirts of my own, which will probably remain at the back of my drawer for several years.

The last stop on my tour was Taormina, a town beautifully situated on the side of a mountain that heads straight into the Mediterranean Sea. This was where I took my best photographs, and had my worst misadventures. Getting off the bus, I managed to dodge the parade of flabby tourists from northern countries to get to my pension, where the old lady in charge informed me that due to technical difficulties in the reservation system (nobody had written it down in her notebook), I had no reservation. She sent me to another pension down the street which had a surplus of rooms (in fact, I was the only guest), probably because they had no air conditioning and were located across the street from a construction site.

The fun was just beginning. On my way to the justly famous Greek theater (which like almost everything else in Sicily that's called Greek is actually Roman), I paid an inflated price for a pair of batteries that turned out to be dead. After confronting the shop owner, I was told the fault was mine for wanting to use these batteries in such an unusual item as a camera, but if I paid two more Euros, I could have more powerful batteries. I asked to try them out first, and indeed, these more powerful batteries also turned out to be dead. At this point, I asked for my money back, and the shop owner invited me to bring the police, which I did, and after heaping much abuse upon my head for wasting his time and opening his packages of dead batteries which because they were opened he could no longer sell to credulous tourists, he returned the money.

The next day, tired of waking up to the sound of jackhammering, winding my way between enraptured tourists, and paying on average thirty-five Euros per meal, I was more than glad to get on the bus back to the Catania airport, which departed on time. All seemed to be well until about a mile from the airport, our bus sideswiped a machine that was paving the road. We pulled over and our driver got out to perform an operatic scene with the construction workers. One of the passengers got off too, flagged down another bus, and hopped on, leaving us to our fate. Finally, a second, empty bus arrived to take the rest of us to the airport, where our plane arrived an hour late, causing the old man sitting behind me and a flight attendant to get into a heated discussion over whether the airline was engaged in a conspiracy to deceive its passengers into believing its flights ever arrived on time.

I can't wait to go back to Sicily.