Sicily & Malta

Less of a blog and more a photo album of images taken in late October of the trip taken by us (with Imogen and Eleanor) and Sam and Juliet Searle to Sicily and then onto Malta by way of the ferry from Pozzallo. I have to say I didn't cope with the driving as well as I would have hoped to do in Sicily and certainly the first day driving through the extremely narrow streets of Enna in the centre of Sicily (and at the highest point if you don't count Etna) I found very challenging indeed.

One of the key reasons for going to Sicily was the chance it gave us to enter Malta in the old-fashioned way (albeit never achieved by the Ottoman Turks) i.e. via the Grand Harbour at Valletta. But we were also keen following a couple of dinners I had had with Professor Graham Loud of Leeds University (a key historian describing the Norman conquests of southern Italy and Sicily) to visit Monreale Cathedral.

For my part, I was also keen to see Syracuse (where Archimedes made his mark) and also Taormina because of the great Byzantine battle which did not involve Belisarius - although it should have done had he not been back in Constantinople having his eyes put out by Justinian.

One thing I had not expected of Taormina was the looming presence of Mount Etna - covered with snow at the top of its near 11,000 feet and, to my eye, at least, seemingly out of proportion to one's assumptions of the background to the city. I must say I wondered - based on the thought the volcano was much the same size in classical times - whether the look and scale influence the builders of both Roman and Greek theatres in the locale.

While there are two or three photos of Malta in this piece, the main lot are images of Sicily. And I was trying to think what I had found most surprising or unexpected about the island. Certainly the scale of Syracuse and, in particular the fact the Greek Theatre appeared to be carved out of the living rock (as they say) but also that enormous quarries - genuinely enormous - had burrowed their ways into the surrounding countryside (a lot of which we drove around by mistake)to produce the stone to build the superstructures of the theatres, the great altar - more like an outdoor abatoir - and so on.

Also Mount Etna.

Also the extraordinarily elegant hotel (Baia Verde) north of Catania in Aci Castello where we stayed for two nights. It had a Fred Astaire feel of elegance even as the season was (very rapidly) winding down.

Also the fact that in Sicily you are either somewhere or absolutely nowhere as we kept discovering when taking the wrong turning.

Also the great sweeps of the coutnryside - much more elegant than I had imagined.