Full Circle

We are back in lockdown in France, up the mountain with the pigs, full circle and finally have the time to tell you about our winter in Sicily. 

We arrived in Palermo early morning, on a ferry full of people pushing their masks from over their eyes to back down over their mouths. 

Once of the ferry we got thrown into the lively, hubble bubble, bustling Palermo, where the traffic flows like a wild river, no stopping, no looking back, just flowing with it and looking ahead, ready to slow down to let someone pull in, being over taken left and right always accompanied by a beep beep. 

We stayed only one day and had much fun exploring this city, its iconography, both ancient and modern ....

 .... a fountain that absorbed us into its belly of mystical creatures, gods and heroes, mermen and mermaids.....

 .... and then we found a statue of our friend John Bee would you believe!

We stumbled upon the No Mafia Museum. A lot to take in in their little exposition of texts and photographs. It felt very brave and relevant.

http://www.nomafiamemorial.org/

We learned about Pipo Fava, who fought against the mafia and for freedom of press, a hero to many young Italians. An inspiring contrast to the mafia glorifying Godfather/Scarface souvenirs that are being flogged on every corner. We would come across his image again later all over the island.

Pippo Fava to learn more see below

https://www.tvfestival.com/docs/press/press-kits/programs/before-night.pdf

 

We loved this bicycle themed, fishy street art outside the fishmonger. 

Later in the park we came across these troubled folk. Surrounding this king with a snake suckling on his breast. Now what is going on here? 

We had to do some reasearch and found out that he is not a king at all but an ancient numen, the genius loci of the city of Palermo. 

What's a genius loci?

In classical Roman religion, a genius loci is the protective spirit of a place.
In contemporary usage, genius loci usually refers to a location's distinctive atmosphere, or a "spirit of the place", rather than necessarily a guardian spirit
In fantasy and science fiction, it refers to a location or piece of landscape with its own intelligence, such as a sentient island, mountain, or even a planet.

Alexander Pope made the genius loci an important principle in garden and landscape design with the following lines from Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington:

    Consult the genius of the place in all;
     That tells the waters to rise, or fall;
     Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,
     Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;
     Calls in the country, catches opening glades,
     Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,
     Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;
     Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

All this in just one day! It is truly a madly colourful city, just as we imagined it would be! 

 

As we cycled out of Palermo the next morning we got to see the other cliche that comes to mind when thinking about Sicily. The rubbish!

Just as we imagined it would be. As we had to wittness this lingering, stinking mess all day it even inspired a little poetry.

Steady scattering of crap
Shards of plastic
Crushed bottles broken
Glass, tiles, a lonely shoe
A carpet of bin bags  over spilling
More again, a foot deep lining
The side of the road
Cana pushing through the concrete
Amongst it tin cans
The combined detritus of a
Believe system
Failed

 

Random bicycle picture of todays blog.

On our way to the olive harvest on mount Etna we bumped into Don Quixote in the pretty village of Santo Stefano di Camastra, renowned for its ceramics. 

Up and over through Floresta, Sicilies highest village and sicilian capital of the porco nero. A beautiful 40km climb that took us all day, from sea level to the top at 1275m where we rewarded ourself with a most delicious plate of macaroni porcini antipasto yum.

From here it is a big long downhill with fantastic views of the ever smoking Etna all the way to Linguaglossa where Europes best mangoes grow and where we spent two weeks harvesting olives for the most delicious olive oil ever.

We helpx-ed our way through the winter between the olive farm on the Etna and a beautiful succulent and cactus nursery close to Siracusa.

Even though the ice cream parlours were mostly closed because of lockdowns we feel we were lucky to have spent our winter here, in the sunny outdoors with nice peeps.

Covid and Brexit have turned traveling into one giant game of Snakes & Ladders, so somewhere along the line we decided it is time to wind our way back to the U.K.

Sooner then expected we packed our bikes and entered the grotto of stone water to find... 

.... the tunnel of riddles...

A bed of feathers, a bubble bath, a smoking dish is the puma's dream...and....this hare without breeches pees into a hole while grazing

What does it all mean? And how will it help us to get back? But where is back?

We found our way back to the ferry port and crossed the mediteranean once again. This time to land in Genoa. Up here in the north everything seams orderly and clean, the drivers are stressed again because they can't just pull out without waiting and we are heading towards the french border. 

A wonderful human being offers us their holiday home in a village not far from the frontier, where the hills are steep and the houses appear to be glued on to the hillside with super strong adhesive. 

Here we spend a couple of weeks making enquiries as to how we can get a covid test for our border crossing, trying to make phone calls in Italian and gaining an insight into Italian bureaucracy, a pretty silly labyrinth of non information and ridiculous opening hours.

In the end we succeeded, pocketed our negative pcr test, ate one last ice cream, waved arrivederci to la bella Italia and made our way through the border controls with a huge wedge of papers and a smile on our faces.