Sicilia Spring - 4

Well, the travel has been open for a couple weeks and we’ve gone to a new town, Scicli. It’s a baroque city with some interesting architecture and hasn’t been heavily impacted by earthquakes. Here’s two of the churches. When we get home I’ll edit this and put in the ones I took with my camera.

Chiesa di San Giovani Evangelista

Chiesa Madre di Sant’Ignazio di Loyola

July 8

Well, we’re back at home, finally, after 4 months and 3 canceled flight plans. It took us basically 6 weeks to get out of Sicily, but I’m not complaining. We had a great place to be stranded. I just wish the country had opened up earlier because there were places and people we wanted to see again. A trip to Erice, Planeta’s La Foresteria resort for our 39th.anniversary, and a birthday lunch for Cathy at Da Vittorio, were a few fun things we couldn’t complete.

I wrote that I was going to add the other Scicli photos, so here they are:

Greenhouses everywhere in SE Sicily. Growing almost everything. Even had olive trees and grape vines under cover.

On our way there we drove down along the Mediterranean through Scoglitti, a beach town.

Rather than continue to Marina di Ragusa we headed north at Santa Croce Camerina into the high country.

Hills are so high they grow winter wheat there.

Looking south towards the coastal plain

We were surprised at the size of the town. It filled the head end of the valley.

A Blue Jacaranda tree in Scicli

The Piazza Italia is used as open seating for a great little restaurant,

To enter you had to have a mask and use the hand sanitizer set inside the front door. It wasn’t as critical sitting outside.

The Chiesa di Santa Maria della Croce e Convento commands the town from this hilltop.

The city hall is used as the set for the police station in the TV series Montalbano. Only in the show all the cars and street seating is removed. So it doesn’t look the same today.

Interior photos from Chiesa San Giovanni Evangelista

The Palazzo Beneventano has wonderful carvings at the doorways.

Even the balustrades on the balconies are ornately carved with gargoyles. Doorways have Saracen and devil head motifs.

While we were in restrictions we couldn’t leave Casa de Viviao, but that was alright. We had gardens and a large yard with great views to the west and north from the side of Mt. Kronio. I was capturing sunset photos and took a couple walks around to capture the trees and plants in bloom. We were here long enough for almost all except the Kapok tree to bloom. Our friend Toto has a multitude of plants, none of them are local, except the oleander and the weeds. His life work as a landscape architect and growing nursery plants for his garden designs means there are a lot of different blooms to see. I’m not going to try and name all these plants, just enjoy their beauty.

I know this one, geranium. At the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento there are geranium bushes, 6 feet high.

Another recognized one, Bird of Paradise. He has a palm tree with a similar bloom, but all white.

A couple old olive trees up past Capo San Marco, near Menfi.

In keeping with the flowers story, we followed a hearse on its way to the cemetery. Now, this is going in style, a Jaguar!

Casa Del Vivaio has a great vista looking out to the west and northwest. I captured multiple sunset shots. In a couple it’s so clear you can see the lighthouse at Capo Granitola, about 30 Km, as the crow flies, from where we were. Near the end of our stay there was a forest fire at Mt. Maggagiaro, 12 km away. By nightfall the flames lit up the clouds in a spectacular fashion. Toto wanted a couple of my shots to use on his website for their business.

Typical late afternoon, scotch and water on the terrace.

The white dot on the horizon is the lighthouse ae Capo Granitola. I posted a photo of this lighthouse back in January 2017 on our last trip here when we drove back along the coast from Mazara del Vallo

We spotted the fire in the late afternoon. We had had really hot weather, the sirocco winds had come through a couple weeks earlier and really dried everything out.

High winds helped the fire take off.

The fire was tamped down by the next morning. Air tankers came in from Reggio Calabria. Our friends told us that the aircraft were from Canada Air. The next afternoon more winds stoked hot spots and the fire restarted. Air tanker were again called in and this time put it our

Well, that’s it for now. I’ve got a couple of day trip photos to post, maybe tomorrow, but don’t count on it.

For the future, since we didn’t get out much while there I’m considering going into my OLD photos of trips to places like the Washington Coast, Olympic National Park and the Grand Canyon. I hope to have electronic versions, I don’t look forward to pulling out my hundreds of slides to scan them, but for the Grand Canyon I may have to. Since Toto and Pascale will probably not be able to come out here to see the Colorado’s big “gully” I’d try to get photos posted for them to try and imagine what it is like.

Ciao for now.