Day Tripping around Sicily
Well, the thunderstorms and heavy rain have returned, again, so it's bloggin' time.
We did get out on the last few days. Not completely sunny, but dry and that meant the roads would not be impassable due to landslides and flooding, maybe. We returned to Realmonte and the Scala di Turchi which we visited on Christmas Day. There was an emaciated little dog at the beachside parking lot and we only had breadsticks to feed it. Italy is full of roaming dogs. Most appear to be taken care of even if the owners don't put collars on them. This one was an exception. You could easily see it's ribs and hip bones. We started carrying a small bag of dog food in case we ran into any more like it. Well, Cathy couldn't forget this poor little hound so we went back with some aluminum foil pans and on the nice day the dog came out and got a good meal, plus extra. As long as she defended it she could eat for a few days. On the way out we stopped at the top of the bluff and caught some shots we had missed before.
The next day we headed back to Mazara del Vallo on the southwest corner of the island. We had been early in our trip here, on a Sunday, and wanted to go back during the week when it wouldn't be so crazy in the city center. We parked down by the port and took off to the areas we didn't walk through before. This time we wanted to skirt the old part of the city, the Kasbah, or old Arab quarter. The streets are narrow and definitely not straight, as Arab sections had always been built. We headed north and east of the Cattedrale, it was closed so we still don't have photos from the inside. RATS!
Anyway, after leaving the Piazza della Repubblica by the Cattedrale we headed alongside the district along the Corso Vittorio Veneto to the Piazza Porto Palermo near the Fumara Mazaro, (Mazaro River) which forms the western boundary of the Kasbah. Along the way we looked for reality offices and found one with a pleasant older owner who took the time to speak with us. Houses here are far more reasonable than in Sciacca. One third or less the cost. The city is pleasant, on the coast, good restaurants, fresh seafood everywhere and flat. We saw as many bicycles on the streets here as in Florence. Here are a photos of the courtyard of the Museo Diocesano and scenes from the Kasbah as we looped through it.
Leaving Mazara del Vallo we drove along the coast, all the way to Tre Fontane, where the road gets a bit less constant. First we came to the town of Granitola with it's Torretta Saraceno, a Marine institute and the Granitola lighthouse.
After Granitola we drove further along the coast and came to Tre Fontane, a summer vacation community on the coast. It's actually a fairly large little town, full of small houses, almost all of them vacant at this time. There were lots of bars and restaurants but only two were open. The town stretches for a few kilometers along the coast and extends about 6 blocks back inland. The storms this winter were especially hard on this town. Sand from the beach was piled up across the lungomare, to depths of nearly one meter at the houses on the other side of the road. There's a low wall, about a meter high, with a metal railing running along the top of it. In most areas the wall, and the railing were buried by sand driven up off the beach. It's going to take a lot of effort to clear the town and restore the beachfront so it's useable.
For our next day trip we're headed back to Erice. We've been there twice before but this time I'm taking my grandmother's birth certificate. We have the addresses for the house where my grandfather was born in Corleone but not for my grandmother's from Erice. One of the things we did is stop at the municipio to see if we could get it. We were directed to the state archive which is located at the elementary school and they checked for me. We found out that she was born in the Contrada San Marco in Valderice, on the east side of the mountain.
I'll cover that, and the Cave de Cusa, the quarry where the stone for Selinunte were cut.
Ciao for now