Sicily: sunshine, mafia and seafood, oh my!

Last week, Anya and I spent 8 days traveling through Sicily and Calabria, Italy. Anya's now past the pregnancy term limit, so this was our last exploration abroad before our duo becomes a trio.

Speaking of which, as a very soft pitch, we've creative wish list of baby stuff if anyone feels the urge to participate in a virtual baby shower. Visit www.JohnLewisNurseryList.com, choose 'buy an item' and input list number 467341. Thanks! Now, on with the show...

The landscape near Palermo airport, our hotel bottom left.

The first thing that struck me about Sicily was how dramatic the topography is. It reminded me of Arizona a bit, though of course here you are surrounded by water of the brightest Mediterranean blue. The northern coastline is like a hallway carpet that some kid's been skidding on, all bunched up with peaks and valleys. In fact our 3 hour drive along the northern coast was least 50% underground in miles-long tunnels.

The view from our hotel terrace in Taormina. If the photo included more to the right, you'd see the smoking snow-covered summit of Mount Etna.

Anya dips a toe in the Ionian Sea, near Taormina

We stopped in beautiful Cefalu and then spent 3 days in Taormina. Taormina is a cliff-top town with dramatic views along the coastline as well as some great beaches down below. We ate well, getting our fill of pasta and seafood and I did my best to drink enough wine to cover for Anya (so as to not show disrespect to our hosts, you see).  We then took the ferry to the mainland and over to the small coastal Town of Locri.

Anya in the narrow streets of  Cefalu

I can't put up this blog post without a few comments on Sicily and Sicilians. Let's get the nice stuff out of the way first - as a whole, they were kind and friendly and genuinely curious about non-Italian tourists coming to visit. They cuisine and history is amazing and we never met someone who wasn't patient as we stumbled through our few Italian phrases or gave up and used Spanish.

Maybe the coolest piazza ever. Cefalu. 

And now to the juicy stuff. Sicily reminded me of Mexico a bit - beautiful and warm, but rough around the edges. Towns are littered with the shells of palatial would-be homes, with nothing built other than the brick or stone shell, as if an overeager buyer had said, "hey, I have $5000 in my pocket, let's start building!" Or, as the rumor was around Locri, they had plenty of money, but couldn't very well oversee the financing from a prison cell. The mafia apparently still pervades nearly every aspect of life in the south and even we heard the rumors on shady dealings.

But I think the most immediate thing we noticed about Sicily were the drivers. I'd heard that they were insane, but I didn't realize the extent to which they'd take risks for little or no gain. I'd be doing 75mph with 4 cars immediately in front of me (so no passing opportunity for anyone) and there would be a guy LITERALLY one foot off my bumper with a child in the front seat. It's just not a logical risk trade-off, but we'd see it time and again.

A feast generously hosted by Tony's family. Anya, Tony and Alison on the right.

The other thing that stood out was that the problem wasn't that Sicilians all drive fast. The problem is actually that half of them drive very fast, but the other half drive very slow. So you'd be driving the speed limit on the highway and then nearly slam into the back of a Fiat doing 40 mph as another Fiat (it's all Fiat down there) slams on the horn as it passes you on a gravelly shoulder, with four children merrily playing without seatbelts, hanging out the windows, threads of gelato streaming from their mouths to the sticky side of the vehicle. It provided us with hours of entertainment, albeit with racing pulses and clammy hands. But I digress.

Locri isn't a place that most people visit (unless your an Italian and it's July or August, apparently). Not to say there's anything wrong with it, it's just a fairly normal town. We were there to meet up with friends from the states who were visiting 3 generations of their family, all of whom to still lived within 3 blocks of where Tony's dad lived before emigrating to the U.S.

Salvatore, Tony's cousin. Very cool dude, and a waiter at a very tasty restaurant

This was our chance to see real Italian life and be force fed pasta, meat and homemade limoncello (again, with me drinking for two so as to not insult).

And eat and drink we did, with Tony's family generously welcoming us into the fold. We spent three great days hanging on the beach and with Tony's family...and sticking out like a sore thumb in a town that is Italian through and through.

Life is good. The beach at Locri, as viewed through my polarized sunglasses.