Ribera: San Nicola, Castello Poggiodiana
We've got a week left. We fly out in 7 days from now. The past 24 hours had more rain and wind in store for us and it's supposed to do the same tomorrow and Thursday. The lady we met from Havre, Montana has been traveling around the island. She went to Catania for it's 3-day festival for Santa Agata. It was televised almost 24 hrs per day on Sicilian TV. What wasn't live was recordings and movies of this event from around 1950 through last year.
Talk about a spectacle. We thought Sciacca's Maria Soccorso was an event. This thing in Catania draws upwards of a million people. I doubt we'll every go simply due to the crowd and craziness. You have to see it to understand. We've watched Sorrento's Easter Week parades. Every day or night there's a procession through the city honoring one saint or another with the town's patron saint St. Anthony's being the biggest. The Santa Agata feste is far more than that. I'd suggest you Google or YouTube the event to get an idea of the intensity of the populace.
Anyway, since it was sunny we decided to head to Ribera, about 20 km away, to check out the Castello Poggiodiana. We also wanted to see the town's patron chiesa, San Nicola. I'll have to admit to brain fart. I got photos of the piazza and the inside but not of the facade of the church. It's not real decorative. It's a pretty much standard Romanesque basilica. The front looks a lot like San Calogero, on top of Mt. Kronio. We may take the time tomorrow, while it's raining, to head back for that photo. Meanwhile here's shots of the inside. It was renovated at the end of the 1990's and is really pretty. They did do something neat. On the inside left-hand side of the central nave and across the entry they exposed some structural elements of the original church's stonework. It's local stone. You can see the quarries on the hills around the city where it came from.
On leaving the church and central city we decided to drive to the Castello Poggiodiana. We followed the yellow and brown attraction sign to a road leading north from the city, down the hill into the valley. It was not a good road. For most of the way we were driving in a steady stream of water coursing down the pavement. Naturally this meant there were areas where the pavement was badly damaged. In fact, missing from parts of it. We crossed a small bridge and headed up a ridge that sits between Ribera and the Verdura river. The road eventually got too mud-filled for us to continue. It was obvious that other vehicles had made it through but our rental 2-wheel drive does not give me the confidence to try mud that deep and for that great a distance. Letting discretion be my guide we turned around and headed back after looking for an alternate way to get close to the castello.
We found it by way of SP 36, the road we took to Caltabellotta in December. It runs along the west side of the Verdura river valley's steep bluff and is close to the castle. On our way out of town on SP 386 towards the coastal highway you get some nice views of the valley and you can see the castle in the distance at the end of a ridge. Across the valley from the castle there appeared to be a large waterfall coming out of the side of the valley cliff wall. There was one hell of a torrent coming out and free-falling into the valley bottom to the Verdura river.
We drove down to SS 115 and west about 2 km to SP 36 and headed back north. About 3.5 km up this highway there's a Sicilian natural preserve along the side of the road. Grazing and hunting are not allowed but you can enter so we pulled into it just off the highway and got out above the castle for some photos. We walked through the pine trees and high grass to the edge of the bluff and got some good close telephoto shots of the castle's remains, the "waterfall" and the valley.
You may have noticed that I've used "waterfall" in some of the photo descriptions. When we got back I asked Toto about this torrent and he told me that it was the outfall from a hydro turbine. I was surprised that the outfall was not captured in a penstock in order to generate additional electricity but he said that it was no surprise since the project was built over 100 years ago and there's no incentive in Sicily or Italy to capture the benefit. That's sad. He's paying almost 7000 euros per year for electricity and all the power generators can think of is not spending additional funds. Instead they buy power from Europe rather than capturing this benefit from a low cost alternative to nuclear power plants or oil burning.
On our return trip for the exterior photo of San Nicola we saw that the outfall was not running. So it's not an outfall, it's the overflow from all the rain we got the prior couple days. I suppose we were fortunate to see it happening. It'd be rare in usually dry Sicily.
He also told me that the Verdura is the only truly fresh water river on the island. All other rivers have sources that run through ancient salt deposits in the mountains that render their water salty. The Verdura starts up by Prizzi and doe not run through salt on it's way to the sea.
Oh well. I don't know how many more posts I'll be taking the time to make. As I said at the start we'll be heading home in a week and we've seen just about all the places we'll have time for on this trip. So,,
Ciao for now.