Saturday

The guidebooks suggested that early morning was the best time to see the Valley of Temples. So we tried to be the first in line when the site opened in the morning — and we were! 

Despite the name, the “valley” of the temples is not a valley at all. It is a ridge. The temples were places there to make them more prominent to both the inhabitants of the city, who actually lived in the valley below, roughly where our hotel is today, and to ships sailing towards the city. There were fortifications along the ridge, and in fact some of those walls are also still standing. From gaps in them you can see how the ridge allows excellent views of the sea

and the surrounding countryside. Of course, military security rather than aesthetics were probably paramount here, but I am sure that the Greeks also enjoyed a nice vista.

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Our first stop was the Temple of Juno. As you can see, the tourists here are not allowed to get all that close to the ruins. 

But with a good lens on the camera there is much to admire.

Our second stop was the Temple of Concord. This is the one that we can admire from our hotel pool. The enormous bronze here is modern, and probably owes more to Barbarella than it does to anything out of Greek mythology. 

This is called the Temple of Concord because nobody can figure our what deity was worshipped here. A much later peace treaty between two warring city states was found here, so the name Temple of Concord stuck. It is by far the most intact Greek structure in Italy. Many of the interior walls are still visible

along with a second row of columns in front. 

Of course, if you can see this structure from our hotel, you can also see the Villa Athena from the Temple as well. We did not have the room with the balcony. I am sure that one cost more than the GDP of some small country. 

We we left, John wanted to get his picture taken with the angel. 

There were two more temples here, but they were a walk and it was getting too hot for John. So we decided to drive to the museum before getting breakfast and leaving Agrigento. Our guide last night had told us that this was the most important archeological museum in Sicily. The museum is located at the other side of the valley on a somewhat smaller ridge. The agora and other municipal sites were here. This is the remains of a kind of amphitheater designed for political discussions rather than theatrical performances. 

There was a lot of pottery and the like inside the museum. I am sure that if you were an expert on Greek archeology the distinctions here between the styles of the pottery would have been fascinating. But neither of us have that kind of background. So we went for the most obvious and over-the-top exhibits. This is one of the monumental Atlases from the Temple of Zeus, a temple so ambitious that it was never finished.  

Here is a reconstruction of what is would have looked like had they finished it. Notice that unlike most temples, this one is closed off. The Atlases both support the weight of the roof and provide a little light into the interior. 

We returned to the hotel and had definitely our best breakfast of the trip. John wanted to remember our all white room, 

and the most luxurious bathroom of the trip as well. John is well over the “let’s go camping” time of his life. 

We had a beautiful ride to Piazza Amerina through lovely Sicilian country side. Our stop was the Roman Villa in Casale. This has the most important collection of Roman floor mosaics in the world. This seems to be a picture of the lord of the manor. Nobody, however, is completely sure who he is. There is some speculation this may have even been an imperial villa. At any rate, it was the residence of a very important Roman.

One of the interesting features here was that it had our own thermal baths. The “dominus” and his family had their own entrance to it. 

Most of the scenes in the villa involve hunting in some way. One long hallway celebrates how the Roman captured animals in Africa and transported them to Rome. This became even more disturbing when you recall that the were not being displayed there for educational and scientific purposes in a humane environment. No, they were being brought there so that they could be publicly slaughtered for the amusement of the public. I have no idea why people from Edward Gibbon to the present decry the “decline and fall of the Roman Empire.” It was a hideously brutal society and would should be happy that this nasty chapter in human history finally came to a close. 

Of course, we can see elements of our own society in theirs. Unlike the Greeks, who relegated women to domestic seclusion, Roman women had some status. They had their own athletic competitions. 

In fact, the Romans were obsessed with competition and the mosaics in the nursery celebrate this idea. A few of these are somewhat fanciful like this goose-drawn chariot. 

We saw the mosaics from elevated metal walkways about five or six feet above the floors. This meant that for visitors to take pictures they had to lean over the rails a bit. Clearly, some poor soul leaned over a bit too much and his cell phone slipped out of his hand!

We left Piazza Amerina intending to go to Ragusa, one of the loveliest of Sicily’s small cities. But as we headed towards the highway, we found ourselves dealing with a little bit of traffic!

We were both actually quite surprised by how street wise the goats were, and in no time at all they were on to their next destination. We were too … at least for a while. Sicily’s has a few high-speed, limited-access highways, but most of the secondary roads seem to have been planned by, well, goats. They meander up and down and around. I found this a bit challenging for driving, but generally charming. John unfortunately is quite prone to motion sickness and before long her became quite ill. We ended up in Gela, not at all one of Sicily’s most charming towns, sitting in the car outside a gas station while he waited for the dramamine to take effect. By the time he was feeling well enough to travel again, we needed to go straight to our lodging outside Siracusa.

We are staying in a masseria or farmhouse tonight. This is some of the most charming yet inexpensive accommodations available for travelers in Italy. We had a lovely reception from our host — who spoke no English — and we settled into our room for a quiet evening. 

 

 

 

 

Segesta and Agrigento

We left the Palazzo Brunaccini with fond memories this morning. Today we start our drive around the island. The front desk called a taxi who drove us to the port area where we picked up car. Now one of the things we have noticed in Italy in the time we have been there is the prevalence of the “man purse” on most males between the ages of 20 and 40. I do not particularly understand the need for this, but I am old and not Italian. 

We had arranged our car rental through Expedia months ago and managed to get a car with an automatic transmission for a remarkably good price. We were given a couple choices at the Budget desk, but I said I wanted the smallest one available. My last car in Italy was a Volvo station wagon and it was a bear to navigate through narrow streets. 

Palermo traffic was awful, but after about 20 minutes were sailing along the autostrade. Of course, those first few minutes in a rental car are the most nerve-racking because you don’t know where anything is located. We first drove to Segesta, the site of an ancient Greek settlement. Located in the middle of lovely pastoral countryside, Segesta has one of the loveliest temples in Sicily and a beautiful amphitheater. 

The temple is largely intact, though the roof is gone. It is made of a local sandstone. 

Few classical sites allow tourists to wander around any more, but I think because Segesta is so far from other places, they assume that the tourists who come here know how to behave. You cannot make that assumption on the Palatine Hill in Rome. 

The theater is a marvel of design and faces out towards the sea. 

John was taken with a more modern architectural wonder, the autostrade winding through the countryside. 

We kept driving across the island for about another two and a half hours. Crossing the interior of Siciliy is not the most interesting of trips, but it is certainly better than driving up through the Central Valley of California. Our stop for the night was outside of Agrigento, the Villa Athena Hotel. Now I am a well-known cheapskate, but even I occasionally figure we ought to splurge. So as I had booked several inexpensive sites for the rest of our time in Sicily, I figured we could splurge one night. And this seemed to be the place to do it. 

Agrigento is only on the tourist trail for one reason:  it is the site of the Valley of the Temples, possibly the most important collection of classical Greek architecture outside of Athens. The Villa Athena is the only hotel located adjacent to the Valley, and from the restaurant and the pool there is a stunning view of the Temple of Concord, the most iconic image of Sicily. 

The temple changed color as afternoon turned to evening. 

We were tempted to linger for the whole evening at the pool, but a wedding reception was being held at the restaurant and the DJ decided to play American pop music at an unnecessary volume. The older people there seemed a little baffled by Bruno Mars live and other selections. For us, while it is comforting to know, as the slogan suggests, that Visa is everywhere you are, it is not so happy to discover the same about Justin Timberlake. We went to our room. 

The hotel offered us a visit to the Valley of the Temples at night when they are all illuminated. This was officially a “gift” from the hotel to its “esteemed clients”, but frankly I figured it had long ago been figured into the room price. John waited in the lobby of the hotel. Like our bedroom, it is pretty much all furnished in white. 

We did not come as close to the Temples as we thought we would. I did get this picture of the Temple of Concord, but the detail is only thanks to a good telephoto lens on the back of our camera. John chatted with a couple from Cheltenham, England. There was another English couple who no doubt were lovely people but looked like the parents in Matilda. They did not seem talkative. 

After this, they took us into the old center of Agrigento. It was a bit nicer than the guidebooks had suggested, but still nothing special. We were treated to a free gelato and then taken back to the hotel. 

Cefalù

Our day began with another pleasant breakfast at the hotel. I discovered that they had a decent wifi signal out here. While you may bemoan Americans bringing laptops to breakfast, all the Italians present were obsessively playing with their iPhones. 

And I had a reason to be online. Our goal for the day was to reach the town of Cefalu and I had to figure out the TrenItalia schedules and how to make it to Palermo Centrale station. Google maps gave me pretty decent directions and we made it with time to spare to catch the 11:05 train. In the past, I have been spoiled by my TrenItalia experiences taking the high speed frecciarossa trains to Lecce and Milan last summer. This was my first experience with second class on a regional train. It was not as bad as I expected, and for 5€ a ticket it was also quite a bargain! 

A little history here. Cefalù comes from the Greek word for headland. The town is indeed located at the base of a huge headland, and no doubt that is what attracted not only the Greeks but the Normans many centuries later. Wherever the Normans went, it seems like the second thing they built after a fortress was a church. The Cathedral here in Cefalù is all that remains of the Norman era. 

As Norman architecture goes, it is not one of the more impressive efforts, at least inside. The mosaic work was never finished and the rest of the decoration is a hodgepodge of Gothic, Baroque, and modern. 

Sometime in the nineteenth centuries the Italians became obsessed with these enormous silver altars. We have seen several examples. They all look like some ecclesiastical version of the America’s cup. Whores, politicians, and ugly buildings may all become respectable with age, as John Huston’s character said in Chinatown, but Victorian silver will always be ugly. 

We did not spend much time at the church, but like modern Italians we went to see Cefalù’s real attraction, the beach! You can catch glimpses of it as you reach the center. 

John was feeling a little dehydrated so we went into a restaurant for a couple bottles of acqua minerale and a quick bite. John jumped in the water while I watched the other patrons. We had two young Spaniards here who could have won the Olympic gold medal for pouting. There was a whole lot of lisping going on as these two argued!

But on to more pleasant topic. The Cefalù beach is justly famous for clear water, lovely sand, and picturesque buildings. 

But we had another stop in mind so we did not linger long. We took the train back to Palermo after a short wait at the station. Even without Il Duce, Italian trains run pretty much on time. If only Amtrak were so good!

Our final destination of the afternoon was the Palazzo Mirto. As some of you know, John adores Visconti’s The Leopard, at least in its correctly edited version. 

The Leopard is the story of the Prince of Salina, a Sicilian aristocrat, who must adapt to the loss of his status when the southern Kingdom of Naples was forcibly incorporated into the northern Kingdom of Italy. Palazzo Mirto recalls that era. It was the home of the Prince of Mirta and his family. Here is a picture of the last prince

and of his wife. 

When the princess died around 1980 she gave the house to the government as a museum. It has been preserved more or less exactly as it was the day she passed away. The place is simply enormous and loaded with all kinds of porcelains and paintings. There was one copy of an English guide that I read as I walked through. 

We both loved the Chinese Room. 

And if the footboard weren’t a problem, I am sure that this is exactly the bed John would want at home. 

We were both taken with the interior courtyard. The fountain is made of marble adorned all kinds of shells. The frescoes on the wall have faded to perfection. 

One of the plot points in The Leopard is whether the Prince and his family will be allowed to keep a chapel at his home or whether he must attend Mass with the hoi poloi. Apparently the Prince of Mirta lost this battle and the family chapel had been converted into a puppet theater.

As we left, we visited the old stables where John struck a D. H. Lawrence inspired pose. 

This evening I’m working on getting caught up with the blog. John went out to pick up a couple sandwiches and managed to get completely lost. Fortunately, he’s back and it’s time for all of us to go to bed. We need to be alert tomorrow. We pick up the car and start driving around Sicily.