Tuesday morning of last week I woke up ready to visit Palermo, the capital city of the region of Sicily. Three lovely ladies (my cousin Giovanna, her friend Luana, and my other cousin's girlfriend Filomena) were my guides through the city. We arrived at Palermo Centrale station after a short ride from the Bagheria train station. From there we started down a famous street in Palermo, Via Roma. We walked past one beautiful church and the most ornate post office I have ever seen to see the first of two amazing theaters. This one I immediately noticed as Teatro Massimo, the theater featured in the film Godfather part III (terrible movie) in the scene of Michael Corleone's son's murder. Directly after seeing this theater we walked to the second famous theater in Palermo (and my personal favorite), Teatro Poilteama. We walked to the other side of the long piazza of the theater to find a small reconstruction of a Greek temple. To the best of my knowledge this temple-like structure has absolutely no historical significance, and yet I found it strikingly beautiful. We then walked to a famous intersection known as Quattro Canti. Each of the four corners of the intersection house a large fountain, one for each season. Directly behind one of the fountains is a beautiful church called San Guiseppe dei Teatini. The interior of this church was magnificent. From there we walked to the duomo of Palermo (the duomo of a particular city is it's largest or most famous church, it does not actually have to have a dome!) which is simply called the Palermo Cathedral. This massive yellow limestone church was a beautiful sight! Strangely the outside was far better to look at than the rather plain interior. We saw a few more churches and ended up at a famous fountain whose official name is Fontana Pretoria however it is known to the locals as Fontana Vergogna or "shame fountain" as all the statues are clearly and bashfully nude. We ended our tour of the city sights by walking down and the path of an old market. When we returned to Aspra I parted ways with my female escorts and thanked them for patiently speaking to me in Italian all day. I had thought the day of picture taking was over. Instead I took some photos of Aspra and my cousin drove me up a nearby mountain so I could take some shots of the whole city from above. I slept well that night after a long day of sightseeing, obviously after applying heavy amounts of cortizone ointment for my countless mosquito bites.
The next day was not as eventful. My cousin Domenico, his friend Mauro, and I went out in their small fishing boat to fish for "poupu"which is Sicilian for octopus. And wouldn't you believe it! We caught nothing! Thus continues my streak of fishing endeavors without catching a single thing ( I think I am up to 6 times in a row). Pardon my digression, but it makes no sense how terrible of a fisherman I am. And yet, I enjoyed myself. The sea was calm, the sun warmed my body, and the view of Aspra and the backdrop of the mountains was beautiful. When I looked out onto Sicily from that little boat, I could not help but notice how ancient the island looked. Jagged mountains shot up and fell down in huge cliffs near the water's edge. The unsettled areas around and lining the mountains were filled with sparse grass and small olive trees. I had to be looking out at the same sights Greek mariners saw five or six thousand years ago when they ventured this far west and first founded settlements on Sicily. In Homer's The Odyessey, one of the most famous classical pieces of Greek literature, the island of Sicily (or what is thought to be the island of Sicily) was inhabited by families of gigantic cyclopes (I googled it, that's the plural version of cyclops) (don't you start doubting me). In the midsts of the adventure of the main character Odysseus, a blinded cyclops by the name of Polyphemus breaks off the tip of a mountain and hurls it at the fleeing Odysseus' ship, sending the rock crashing into the Mediterranean. I stood in that tiny boat, flinging my fishing rod, finally understanding why Homer had used Sicily for such a story. So many of these mountains looked as though their tops has been loped off by a giant. As I recreated the scene in my head, I couldn't pick which mountain in my plain of sight would be my wounded mountain, sitting at a fraction of the height it used to have before Polyphemus had to decapitate it. Unfortunately my most unplanned and sloppy attempt at speaking Italian was trying to explain this story to Domenico and Mauro. I kept mentioning words like mountain and cyclops, they had no idea what I was trying to say.
Later that evening I was brought to a small and famous village called Santa Flavia. I tried taking pictures but I found out very fast the orange light of street lamps is the worst lighting for photographs. I believe I spared some in order to show you how terrible the photos came out.
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