Adventures in Navigation Monday, Nov 2 2009

21 October, Wednesday.

Today was Ancient Rome, as dearly as the universe fought against it. Roberto, Vince, and I, plus Mike and Eavan (a guy and girl from Portland and Michigan State) headed to the Metro to go to the Coliseum, and were a little surprised when the Metro stopped at Ottaviano and the conductor, announcing a problem at the Flaminio stop, said we would be moving in a few minutes. A few minutes turned into twenty, and we ditched the Metro and ran into another girl from class who had called our Professor to get a bus. We hoofed it over to the main piazza to catch a bus to Piazza Venezia, already very late at this point, bad since we were going into the Coliseum today. Of course, when we hit Venezia, already forty minutes late because the bus had been very suspiciously bogged down in traffic, we were thrust into the center of some elaborate state ceremony taking place at the Vittorio Emmanuele building, with loads of onlookers clogging up the streets. Finally, fifty minutes late, we hit the Coliseum. Professor Hansen made a few sarcastic remarks during the presentation, but otherwise we were fine, and enjoyed our quick trip through the ancient blood sport stadium.

After class, I met Matt at Ottaviano, since the Metro was mercifully working, and then checked out a little store he had found with all sorts of swords, jewelry, and collectibles. We had lunch at a restaurant called something Grotto, where I finally got to try Amatriciana (we’d talked about it in Italian class) and wished I could have eaten three plates, then I showed him the wonders of gelato at the spot by the 280 bus stop. After we walked towards the Tiber and took a post-lunch break sitting on the side of the river, then headed to the museum of the Ara Pacis, where I rambled off all the facts I’d learned about it in class and Matt told me I was probably the only one in my class who still remembered that. We were looking for the Mausoleum of Augustus and ended up in Piazza del Popolo, where I had meant to show Matt the obelisk that Augustus brought back from Heliopolis, Egypt for his sun dial. It turned out that it was actually a different piazza where the obelisk was, and we stopped and Matt explained the Egyptian to me. But in Piazza del Popolo, we did find another obelisk. We were lured there by the sweet sounds of Celtic bagpipe music, which turned out to be coming from a large group of Jordanian men in a band, wearing traditional Jordanian outfits spiced up with Scottish tartan and bagpipes to complement the usual brass band instruments. With their flag out front, they played and sang Jordanian songs and marched cheerfully around the square. We weren’t really sure why they were there, but they were delightful to watch.

We ended up finding the Mausoleum right back next to the Ara Pacis. It was a pretty stone structure, but unfortunately covered over with a great deal of grass. Next to it, along the fence, we found a fascinating piece of installation art, a series of little carefully arranged objects, coins and signs and whatnot, entitled “Rome Oggi” / “Rome Today.” They expressed very wittily and, in some cases, sarcastically the state of modern Rome, many using signs and phrases that I see around Rome every day. Then, we caught the 913 bus back to Medag and Cindy and Matt and I made risotto, which again turned out to be delicious, even though Cindy and I were pretty much winging it for most of the way through. At night, Matt and I hit a cheap and delicious 24-hour bakery and then ended up back at Stay Rebel, for a few drinks and a rather serious discussion.

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The Magic Keyhole Sunday, Nov 1 2009

20 October, 2009.

We took an early train back to Rome and then stopped at the Medag so Matt could drop off all the stuff he’d brought for me, including a white Huddle bag stuffed full of cherry Jolly Ranchers, joy! We parted at San Pietro so he could find his hostel and I walked with Caitlin G. to Mystics. We split in Trastevere so she could hit up the computer lab and I grabbed some delicious pizza, and ran into my Lit teacher, who gave me my paper back and told me I should stay at JCU. Mystics was fun, as always, and Conty, to our delight, was wearing purple, Rome’s stylish color of the season. The Italian test afterward was long and tedious but at last over. It had been set for last Thursday, but Maggini told us, with sunglasses covering half her face, that she had fallen and now had two black eyes, which was rather sad. After class, I met Matt on the Ponte Garibaldi and walked with him, Katie, and Marcelo to the Aventine hill, where Marcelo said he had something to show us all. In a large eerie courtyard guarded by silent army soldiers with guns, we found a large wooden door inscribed overhead with the arms of the Order of Malta, a military religious order. This is the Magic Keyhole of Rome. Looking through, we saw a large arched tube made entirely of green ivy, which outlined a perfect view of the dome of San Pietro.

After this beautiful sight, we headed to the edge of the Aventine to look over all of Rome, pointing out to Matt some of the main attractions (though he had seen many, having hit the Colloseum, Circus Maximus, and a few other far-flung sites during the day), and then returned to Medag to chill before dinner. Genie had four friends from London visiting and she made salad and amazing steak for us all, plus pesto pizza! Her friends, four boys, were all very entertaining and fun to talk to, and afterward we took all the visiting guys to Millennium for their taste of Roman gelato. After, Matt, Katie, Marcelo and I played Hearts, at which I dominated (okay, I beat Katie by one point only, but the two of us crushed Matt and Marcelo) and then Matt and I, unable to stay and play cards at Medag thanks to Italy’s delightful student housing laws, ended off the night at Stay Rebel before he brought me back to Medag and then headed to his hostel.

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Missing Fingers and Ninja Turtles Sunday, Nov 1 2009

19 October, Monday.

Today was a brisk tour of everything Florentine. We started with Sante Croce in the morning to pay homage to Michelangelo and Gallileo (I had to stand coughing obviously in front of Gallileo’s tomb for near on five minutes before Matt realized what he was looking at and nearly had a heart attack) and check out the slightly more uncovered altar. Lunch was at a slightly touristy place that still had very good food, and quite good truffle sauce and black ravioli, which I’ve never seen before. Then, we hit up the History of Science museum, which was sadly under construction and, though it had some interesting artifacts, lacked the prized relic, Gallileo’s finger. That disappointment out of the way, we took a trip into the Duomo to gape at the gorgeously painted dome, still amazing to me though I’d seen it already, and then to San Lorenzo, a new sight for me. The church is a little plainer than some others, which simple alcoves decorated with paintings by mostly unknowns, but surprising are the tombs under the floor before the altar, which house Cosimo Medici, the founder of the famous Florentine family, and, drum roll, Donatello. The painter’s grave was paired with a simple and beautiful cenotaph and the back chapel was gorgeously done with a domed ceiling of stars and constellations. Matt and I thought of hitting all the Ninja Turtles in one day, but were unsure where to find the graves of Da Vinci and Raphael.

After that, we headed to the Accademia to check out David, but found it very depressingly closed. Our sadness was softened by a trip into Sanctissima Anunziata, the beautiful church that I visited last time, where a kindly old caretaker man explained to us and a few tourists, in drastically broken English peppered with Italian, that the church was painted by the same artist. This artist left all the faces of the figures out on the paintings until the last night, so that in the morning, they were all filled in and completed at once. There were more facts that I’ve sadly forgotten, but it made the church seem even more special. We had a panino snack from a delicious little shop before another walk, then hit my favorite Antico Fattore for dinner. Ricardo did not seem to remember me, but the food was as good as I had remembered, though the wine we had was a little pricey. Rabbit for Matt, pasta with (shocker) mushrooms for me. At last, sadly, our final day in Florence came to a close.

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Returns and Reunions Sunday, Nov 1 2009

18 October, Sunday.

I met Matt at Termini in the morning, after a bit of confusion trying to find each other, and waited there catching up and eating PB and J sandwiches before the Florence train. We sort of got on the wrongish train but it turned out to be fine. Matt tried to get some sleep since he’d gotten barely any in the last couple of nights and I did some homework on the train (four hours, no small trip), then we finally arrived in Florence! We walked around a bit, looking at the usual sights, the Duomo and all that, and then headed to a place called Trattoria Ponte Vecchio near the bridge of the same name for dinner. Despite what I would expect from the location and name, it was reasonably priced and very delicious. I had wild boar sauced pasta and Matt had lamb. A few girls from Israel asked where we were from because they’d heard us talking in English. The waiter, who spoke Italian to me and seemed to think that Matt couldn’t understand him, asked if we were from Sweden. When I said no, and added that my family was Calabrese, he looked at the blonde hair and said, “Oh, Siciliana!” It was nice to have someone finally acknowledge that my hair is Italian, thank you very much. After that, we hung out for a while on the Ponte Vecchio, one of my absolute favorite places, hit up La Carraia for delicious gelato (Peach and Cheesecake for me and Black Cherry for Matt, so good!), and then called it a night.

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The Eternal City in a Garden Sunday, Nov 1 2009

17 October, Saturday.

I chilled at home for most of the morning, then went boot shopping with Cindy and Katie in the afternoon. Cindy found some nice brown ones but Katie and I were still looking. Then, we went to Castel Sant’Angelo, the great round edifice of brown brick built to entomb the emperor Hadrian, which was claimed by the Popes as their fortress, and connects to the Vatican by a secret path—true, for all you Angels and Demons fans. The inside was beautifully eerie and fitted with old and modernist paintings and medieval artifacts in dim courtyards, and from the arrow-slit windows we could see all of Rome, stretched out blue-gray and gilded in the sunset. As we stood atop its highest perch, over which the Archangel Michael stretches his protective sword in gray-green copper, we picked out all the little lights of places we knew, finding our usual haunts in miniature across the city. It was a beautiful Rome moment and, for some reason, as I looked at the little fuzzy streetlights spotted along the Tiber, and heard the thin whine of a street musician’s saxophone in the air, I was reminded of Michigan Avenue in the winter, and found myself at once loving Rome and missing Chicago with equal force.

With this strange serene melancholy flaring, I went with Cindy and Katie down the river to Trastevere, a loud and life-filled place at night, where we went to the Trattoria where Katie and I had been forced to skip out on lunch. The girls ordered some awful anchovy-sauced greens as their starters, but the pastas we had were delicious. I got something with mushrooms and cheese and was extremely well-fed. After this, we stopped back at the Medag to change clothes and then went with Genie to meet the rest of the gang at Scholars to watch the USC game. Roberto quizzed Katie and I in football and we failed miserably. Then, Toby from the B(us) showed up and I directed him to Katie C. and Genie, after which Roberto came up and asked in confusion, “What did Heath Ledger want?” The game was fine except that it froze often and ND was playing dreadfully, so Katie and I talked to keep ourselves occupied and ended up leaving early with Chrissy, who wasn’t quite over her sickness from the last week. Then I got home, and packed for Florence!

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An Eternal Moment Wednesday, Oct 28 2009

16 October, Friday.

Pompeii. Just let it sink in a little. Yes, I finally, finally got the chance to visit the ancient city destroyed by Mount Vesuvius, a long-time dream. Katie, Cindy, and I left at an ungodly early hour (six, for those of you following along at home) and ran for a bus only to realize that it was stopped at a red light. Fail. But at least we hit it, and cruised into JCU with plenty of time to spare. Our other friends, also on the trip, came later and we saw them standing outside the bus window, only to find out that the second bus was broken and a new one would be sent before we could head off. Half an hour later, we were whizzing along towards Napoli, with two buses full of snoozing college students. I was comfortably passed out against the window. We woke only for a quick stop at the autogrill (European rest stops, as I discovered in Greece, are filled with food and gift shops and mountains of candy and other awesomeness) before another quick nap and then Pompeii!

We were a little late but still had plenty of time to explore. While Katie and our other friends sectioned off with their classes, since this was a field trip for many of the on-sites, Cindy and I joined the group of students who had just come for fun, led by one of the off-duty professors. She was an odd, rambling woman, but she was sweet and had a deep knowledge of Pompeii. She took us first to the Tombs outside, large, well-preserved stone structures outside the walls, where Roman families vied with each other to catch the eyes of wanderers entering the city. One, which we unfortunately did not see, was even fitted with a bench, so that a weary traveler could take a rest while perusing the names of that particular family. Then we headed into the walls, into an ancient fairytale. Preserved fantastically from Vesuvius’ ash, the city stands near-intact, its houses still adorned with their peeling frescoes, its taverns fitted with mosaic marble counters lacking only food, its roads still winding through the same routes with the same grass-outlined stone. Only the roofs really lacked, and a few crumbles of stone from the volcano and earlier earthquake damage.

But unlike Rome, whose crumbled and pillaged monuments huddled in cordoned-off islands of antiquity midst the modern metropolis, Pompeii exists in a timeless vacuum within its walls, but for age hardly altered from the thriving mercantile community that Vesuvius crystallized in ash. The theater with its mostly-intact seats waits for an orator to fill its bowl with his voice, and the many remaining columns in the Forum impart the incredible size and majesty of the once busy city center. Some of the large buildings especially suffered most from the disaster, the Basilica for one existing as only broken column bases and the halved walls of a formerly two-story structure, but trapped in this haunting wonderland, the mind does not need much strength to augment what the eye cannot see. Especially beautiful was the Temple of Isis, a small cult house cloistered in a courtyard where secret initiates held meetings to the popular goddess. The baths still retained much of their original mosaics, and we almost wanted to fill them up and take a nice warm rest. No visit is complete, of course, without a visit to the Bordello, the famous brothel where “inspiration” frescoes of satisfied customers still line the ceilings. But especially haunting were the ash encrusted bodies in glass cases, holed up in the Temple of Eumachia and barred behind half-open wooden barricades in the villas. Frozen in the positions they adopted just prior to death, they are almost bloated and doll-like with the ash coat, except for their hands and heads. Here, the ash chipping away reveals large domed skulls and gnarled finger bones poking from gray hands. These signs remind you that these are the remains of real people, people who lived and walked these streets, people whose honorable burial has been traded for these glass cases where tourists can gawk at the last moments of their agony.

On that cheery note, we stopped for lunch and then headed to the Villa of Mysteries, a large suburban dwelling just a few meters from the city walls. It is so-called for its back room, allegedly a cult-house of Dionysius. The soft frescoed figures on the deep red walls seem at first normal and unassuming, until you notice little signs of something you are not being told—a boy reading a book whose text you cannot see, a woman gaping at a hidden mirror, a winged figure whipping a crouching woman, a satyr peering at something with his back turned. Pondering the mysteries of the cult’s practices, we returned to the bus for another delightful nap, this time sprawled out across our own seats. When we got home, we whipped up a quick fruit salad to bring up to the boys’ room for a pot luck dinner with the visiting London students. We had delicious pasta, bruschetta, and wine and just hung around talking and laughing, and sharing our tales of the ancient city risen from the ash.

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Adventures in Public Transportation Saturday, Oct 17 2009

9 October, Friday.

Today was . . . well, remarkably unproductive. I had meant to finish my paper, but instead, Genie and I sat in the living room and procrastinated and had a delightful snack of crackers, cheese of various kinds, basil, and peperoncini. That night, to save ourselves from the humiliation of having spent the whole day in Medag, Genie and Katie C. and I decided to go to Mezza Luna, the awesome pizza place where Daniele had taken me and Genie and Lauren a ways back. We actually found it pretty quickly after getting off the Metro and asking the bartenders in one of the bars about the bus stops, and got a table right away. Our waiter asked us where we were from and we told him, then heard him telling the two boys behind us who were with their mother, who was joking to them to talk to us. It’s always funny when Italians think you can’t understand them.

Dinner was absolutely phenomenal and not terribly expensive. Genie and I split these things called Mezze Luna, which were little pieces of fried dough with cheese and prosciutto and salami and mortadella inside. All three of us split some sparkling white wine (Italy has forced me to appreciate white wine, since it’s actually good here and few of my friends like red wine), which was fantastic. Then, we all got pizzas for dinner. Genie and I had the same kind, which had cheese, eggs, olives, prosciutto, and mushrooms and was gone in approximately three minutes. But rather than stopping there, we all had desert too. I had some strawberry thing with gelato, Katie had tiramisu, and Genie had crème caramel. It was amazing and we were totally stuffed by the time we paid.

Then, we headed back to Termini station by bus. On the bus, these two guys from Germany were talking to us. They had studied in Holland and were studying in Rome now. They told us some good places to go in Germany and some of the places they had been in Italy. They wanted us to come clubbing with them, but obviously we were not going to go off with random German guys with no ND guys as bodyguards. So, Genie got their number. The one guy who talked the most entered it into her phone as “Toby from the B,” so we’ve been calling him that every since. Then, on the Metro, this nice little family came up to us and tried to ask us about the Metro in broken Italian. Genie realized that they were Spanish and started talking to them in Spanish. They were very grateful and were getting off at Cipro with us, so Genie talked to them for a while and Katie and I, who could follow the Spanish but only respond a little, followed along. They were a mom, dad, and two girls, all from Argentina, here on vacation. We helped them to Cipro and then huddled with them around the map in search of their hotel. The street wasn’t on the map, but my Blackberry came through and we walked up from the station to the big intersection so we could point them in the right direction. They were so nice and it felt kind of good to actually be able to help them, and they were so grateful and sweet.

That night, most everyone was gone, so Genie and Katie and I sat in the living room on our computers, drinking Spumante and exploring the people on iTunes with shared music libraries. We found this one girl who had a techno song whose lyrics were limited to “Put your ass in the air.” I kid you not. It was kind of catchy but SO bizarre, and we were laughing hysterically listening to it. We also tried to mix the Spumante with exotic fruit juice, which turned out to taste like potatoes because it had so much papaya in it. Not recommended. After an hour and a half of talking, laughing about the night, and listening to random music, we finally went to sleep.

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The Great Castle Competition Monday, Oct 12 2009

4 October, Sunday.

Today was, without doubt, one of my favorite days of the whole semester. We woke lateish and trudged over to Salvatore’s at ten a.m. for coffee and croissants, then drove back to the cabana bar for a trip to the beach. We rented chairs and just spent the first hour or so sitting, relaxing, and enjoying the ocean air, took a little stroll through the water, and then watched as the boys attempted to create a sand castle. To make them aware of their utter architectural inferiority, the four of us girls started on our own castle, creating a foot and a half high mound that the boys’ sneeringly called a loaf of bread which we shaped into a bricked mountain and crowned with towers, around which we dug a masterful moat and touched it off with a mountain path and a door and drawbridge of reeds. Halfway through, the boys finished on their first castle, which, with the walls, was in the shape of a heart, much as they denied it, and started on a second castle. Since their first clearly paled in comparison to ours. They mockingly called ours a Sun Temple, but we all know who made the better castle, and it wasn’t the people who got their structural advice from St. Valentine.

Midway through our competition, we stopped for lunch and had some of the best linguine pescatore that I have ever eaten in my entire life, coated with homemade sauce and loaded with fresh tomatoes, fish, shrimp, calamari, and capers, paired with salad and lemon granita (slushie). Very satisfied, we stayed a few more hours on the beach, eight in total, and then, happy and relaxed, decided it was time to leave. Just before we left, the boys decided to add a little wreckage to their castles because, being boys, they just couldn’t help but kicking them. When I remarked that it would take more than a kick to demolish ours, of course they kicked it. Twice, because the first time Roberto hardly made a dent. When I went over to defend our fort, Marcelo tripped me into the castle and I crashed on top of it, crushing it. Hot for revenge, I made a break for their first castle, which they had left intact as a monument. Roberto and Marcelo tried to stop me and in the process I fell and twisted off my flip flop, but just as Marcelo was about to help me up I lunged through the gap and punched a hole through their tower. Ah, sweet revenge.

With the castles made ruins, we headed out onto the strip by the sea to a small pizzeria where we were the only customers, since no respectable Italian eats dinner so early as seven pm. Genie and I split two pizzas, one an approximation of a thick-breaded local favorite and the other mushroomy goodness, and devoured them both. Some of the best pizza I’ve ever had, for sure. We topped off the night with gelato and nutella covered crapes (split between, of course) and then headed to the airport, or at least attempted to. Roberto and Katie took the Smart and the rest of us piled into the Yaris (which I drove from the beach to the restaurant and would loathe to repeat; Italian cars are so damned jerky) with Marcelo driving. The signs for the highway were half-hidden and unclear and with each block, we drove into darker and more run-down streets, with gangs of slick-haired Italian men watching us go by. We stopped a safe-looking old baker to ask for directions and he told us, warning us also that we should probably never do that again. He led us truly but we missed the turn for our highway and Marcelo pulled the car first down a dark and deserted drive lined by factories, making us yelp, then into the back side of a warehouse, right next to the dumpsters. The lonely car parked a little down the way was enough to make us scream at him to get going. In fear of pineapple retaliation, we zipped over to the right interchange, pulled around to get gas, and then headed to the airport, where we planned to sleep.

With our flight at eight in the morning and the time having barely hit midnight, we played a few heated rounds of Kemps (a fantastic card game involving secret signals between partners) at the abandoned American Express courtesy table. Genie and I dominated, of course, though Roberto and Katie put up a good fight with their sneaky signals. Cindy and Marcelo could not quite seem to get their wires uncrossed. After that we were all exhausted, so we wrapped up in towels and stolen airline blankets and stretched out across the seats in the waiting area, hoping to catch a few hours of stiff sleep.

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My Castle Beats Your Castle Monday, Oct 12 2009

3 October, Saturday.

After waking up and breakfasting on toast and jam in the hostel, and saying goodbye to the Aussies, the Brit, and Giuseppe and Andrea, we headed out for the road. Genie and I took the Smart and the rest piled into the Yaris for an hour’s trip to Segeste. The roads ran along the edges of the cliffs over the sprawling ocean towns, perched on the edge of the Mediterranean, and then wound through the mountains up to the small hilly town, site of one of the most excellently preserved Greek temples in Sicily. Crafted in the Doric style, it still stands almost as it did when first built, its warm red stone rising into a full colonnade over a large base. Only the roof, never built, lacks. After marveling at this ancient wonder, we piled back into the cars. I took the Smart again, but this time Marcelo drove as we headed towards Erice, a mountain town. With the Smart in manual, we climbed up the mountain in jerks, at one point taking a wrong turn and almost venturing onto a steep dirt road which, seeing it later from the peaks, might have done us in.

But we made it safely to Erice, parking our car in the line on the edge of the mountain, overlooking the valley crashing into the sea below. We sought out food and ended up splitting up for lunch, since the selection was disappointingly touristy and none of us could agree. Marcelo, Genie, and I ate a small meal at a little café, just caprese salad and bread for the girls, and then filled up our stomachs at a local pasticceria, where the server gave us a slew of different samples so delicious that we ended up buying a dense honey-almond cake, marzipan, a little almond cookie, and a cannolo to split. So good! After lunch we trekked up the mountain to the peak, on which was perched an old stone castle, splayed across the cliffs and bridging the gap between them. Venturing into its outer courtyard, we investigated the rooms that started as an old temple to Astarte, then Roman baths to Venus, to finally a medieval lord’s castle. Made doubly beautiful by its long and apparent history, it was multiplied even more by the views from its crumbled outer walls. Over the edge, the whole of the surrounding lands were spread, from the wide clear salt flats to the crowded towns to the strips of sandy beach and their tiny crashing waves rising out of the cerulean span.

With our trip to Erice redeemed, we headed down the mountain to Trapani, a beautiful seaside town overrun by masses of tweens wearing purple. We met the guys, who had taken the Smart, at a beach bar right on the ocean, complete with cabanas and parrot-colored rentable beach chairs. We sat with drinks and just enjoyed the salty sea air. I was much reminded of Hilton Head, and was sad to leave when it was time to seek out a hostel. Which, in Trapani, is a rare sight. We finally, at the direction of a bartender, stumbled upon a sketchy bed and breakfast with a letter-sized sign with name and phone number bolted next to a wide wooden door in a narrow side street. Katie called the number and Salvatore told us he would be there in five minutes. We all took bets on what he would be, but were all wrong. Walking briskly up to us was a cheerful old Italian man with a fluffy gray moustache and a shirt stained from cooking pasta sauce in his nearby Trattoria. He lead us up yet another set of dark and dubious stairs to a quaint little apartment, decorated with mismatched wallpaper, the kind of porcelain figurines that Great Grandma used to hoard, and shiny bedspreads straight out of a Carol Wright catalogue. It was the perfect chintzy Italian apartment and we had it all to ourselves.

After naps, we went to Salvatore’s trattoria for an expensive but delicious dinner of spirally pasta in a local pesto sauce, bread, wine, and for me and Marcelo, cous cous pescatore. We walked to a gelato place after that, then grabbed drinks at a corner store and sat on the wharf, just talking and enjoying the sea air. After, we headed to a café for a small tasting of Trapaneze winds, delicious and made spicy from the burning-hot snacks they gave us, and cassata, a Sicilian cake with almond paste and fruit. At the bar after that was our first Pineapple (our code word for Mafia) sighting; for, Sicily is one of the only places still run by the Mob. There was a large, imposing looking man in a button down shirt standing behind the bar not doing work, and he didn’t seem to be able to answer any of our questions about the selections either. When Genie saw the waitress pass him a wad of cash and heard him say, “I need 200 more,” we knew we had our pineapple. The others had local wine too sugary for me and Genie and I had capiroskas, and we sat and sipped while playing the one word story game, which got a little ridiculous with the innuendos and had us laughing obnoxiously. We tried a chic place called Muna after that but we were too tired to wander much, and just walked around enjoying the modern quaintness of Trapani before heading to bed, cheered by news of an ND football victory. As always, when I’m not there to jinx it.

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Tales from the Crypt Sunday, Oct 11 2009

2 September, Friday.

Forgive me for my long hiatus, and let me regale you with the chaotic tale of my adventures in Sicily. We left at 4:30 am to take a cab to the airport. I was running on three hours of sleep and a little delirious, making the half hour cab ride at 130 kmh even more jarring. When we arrived at the airport to check in, Marcelo realized that he didn’t have his passport. We checked in and he dashed out of the airport with an hour and a half until our flight. We waited outside the Dolce and Gabbana store watching runway walks on the televisions until finally Marcelo returned, breathless, one 80 euro cab ride and 30 minutes later. For those of you doing the math, yes, Marcelo hit Medag and back, including time it took him to run up to his room and get his passport, in the same time it took us to get the airport one way. Yes, there were traffic laws broken.

With that fright out of the way, we boarded our mostly-empty flight, fell asleep stretched out across our own rows, and woke up in Palermo to a torrential rain shower. Instead of the van we had planned to rent, which turned out to be manual transmission, we rented a Smart car and a Toyota Yarus. Roberto drove the smart with Genie as his passenger and Katie drove the Yarus with Marcelo navigating in the front seat and me and Cindy passed out in the back. After losing our way, we had a delightfully horrendous jaunt through the crowded, narrow, dirty streets of Palermo in search of our hostel. Though we knew where it was and what streets crossed it, all the streets there were one way and none of them seemed to be going in the right direction. We ran over a door, had several head-on confrontations in back alleys, were turned away from a church parking lot by a bum / policeman, went down several roads the wrong way, saw nearly every sight in Palermo as it breezed by, and passed up our hostel just as we reached the right road. Finally, when Marcelo was on the verge of a breakdown, we hit our hostel again and parked the car in a questionable spot on the side of the road. Success.

We reached the hostel, which was situated past a half-finished courtyard with chipped stucco and exposed pipes and up several flights of stairs slapped together in pylon wood and sheet metal. Sketch? Yes, yes it was. But when we opened the door, Giuseppe, the hostel host, welcomed us into a quaint little apartment with several rooms, a homey living room / dining room combo, and a little terrace garden. Roberto and Genie had just arrived there ten minutes before, after struggling with a map of Milan and another map of Palermo that filled the entire Smart Car. They had lost half our reservation, but rearranged us so that we were all in one room with three sets of bunk beds. Giuseppe gave us a map and marked out sites for us, and then we were off with a few weather-worn umbrellas courtesy of, again, Giuseppe. We stopped for lunch first at the place Giuseppe recommended where we tried Arancine, aka large balls of fried rice, cheese, mozzarella, and various fillings; mushrooms, for mine. They were the size of softballs and I was really the only one who liked them, even though afterwards I thought I would die.

We walked by the seaside, very much reminded of Tortuga by the creeping trees like Caribbean plants and gray-washed buildings by the turquoise water, then took refuge from the rain (yes, it was still pouring, with intermittent breaks of light showers) in the Duomo, a pretty and airy church with Byzantine-like cupolas. Since we were nearly falling asleep in the pews, we headed to the outskirts of the city, where the trash was piled high and the buildings even more dilapidated (Palermo is not what I would call clean or pretty, by any means, though it does have a grungy sort of charm. The rain turning the garbage heaps into unidentifiable slush was no help either.), towards the Cappuccinni catacombs. The catacombs were, in the late 1800s, discovered to have amazing preservative properties, and so many people were buried there.

Now, the room is a walk-through gallery of death, a maze-like arrangement of corridors lined with wall niches in which mummified corpses hang like mounted fish shoulder-to-shoulder. They exist in different levels of preservation, some only skulls on stuffed bodies, others full corpses with cracked hands and leathery faces, all wearing the same clothes in which they were buried, ragged and greyed with age. Poor men hang next to rich men, soldiers, friars, and priests. A few are laid out in horizontal niches in stacks, though most are horizontal, as though standing suspended. The men’s gallery gives way to the women’s, and then, the most horrific, to the children’s, where infants and small children, some horrifically shriveled, are interred. One screened-off chapel houses the perfectly preserved corpse of a small three-year-old girl, over a century old. Another little girl with age-blackened skin stares down at the passersby, an eerie reminder that this is no haunted house, though the crates full of skulls in the excavation room, marked Product of Sicily to label the oranges they once held, would make it seem so. We talked quietly and nervously, wondering how a body would fare in these strange chemical conditions.

A little graver and a little paler, we emerged from the mass grave into the street, with Marcelo threatening to throw Cindy to the Cappuccinis if she complained any more. Our next stop was, incongruously, a café famous for Settevelli, a cake with seven layers of different chocolates. The outside, a street strewn with garbage in an area where we expected to see transients lighting garbage-can fires, contrasted starkly with the inside, a classy little bar-style café with rows of delicious sweets. Genie and I splurged on a split Settevello, cannolo, and tart, all of which were fantastically delicious and well worth the long walk. We stopped by a sadly-closed Norman church before perusing the huge street market, with Rex, our stray dog, guiding us for nearly a mile, walking ahead like a tour leader and stopping to make sure we followed when we stopped. Don’t forget it was still pouring, as it had been all day and would until well until the evening.

Our last stop was the Chiesa Gesù, a fantastically gorgeous church with elaborately decorated alcoves, detailed mosaics, and the most beautiful paintings on the ceiling, bright pastel colors with soft glowing lines that, I hesitate to admit, reminded me of the style of Mary GrandPre. And you’ll just have to google her to find out why, because I won’t own it here. After crashing the end of a casual wedding at the church, we returned to the hostel for a brief nap. Roberto, on the bottom of my bunk, tried to shake the bed to wake me up and Marcelo and Katie were having a war over on the other end of the room, but I was too half-dead even to sleep, so while Genie and Cindy passed out, the rest of us talked about whether there would be cockroaches or fleas in the room, whether we would visit Cindy in the Catacombs, and all that we had been through during the day. Katie started rambling about Toast Stories when someone mentioned Ghosts, and we managed to nap a little before heading out to the living room to talk with some of the other hostel guests. Giuseppe and his girlfriend, Andrea, invited us all to dinner nearby. After collecting Jamie and Tam, a couple from Australia, and Greg, a Londoner who had ridden his bike all the way from London to Sicily (there was a ferry involved), we all headed to a local place nearby with a fixed-price seafood menu.

The meal was amazing, starting with a tomato salad, after which we were all given a plate of sea bass, swordfish, cod, calamari, two prawns, and water and wine and coffee. We all talked about our lives and what we were doing here. Tam and Jamie were taking two years off just to travel around and hadn’t been back to Australia in a year and a half, and Greg was just doing a bit of travelling on a year-long holiday. Must be nice. All full, we all headed to a local bar where we shared a drink and then walked home. We were all happy and hyper and Cindy was swinging around light poles and we had to go move the car to make sure it wouldn’t get towed, then had a very deserved rest.

Quotes of the Day

1. Cindy: Wow, these people are big on photocopies.
   
2. Marcelo: Look, there’s stairs! There’s stairs at the end! (said in exasperation after discovering the end of the street down which we were driving)
   
3. Cindy: maybe they made their way back to the mainland. (of Roberto and Genie, who were still MIA)
   
4. Marcelo: I need to check my bank account, then find a bancomat. Then probably cry.

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