Sicily: Palermo

We stayed in Palermo for a week. It’s a crowded and chaotic city, with high buildings lining the streets (often providing some much needed shade) and full of constantly hooting traffic. Crossing the road seems to be entirely negotiated, even to some extent at signal-controlled crossings and certainly at zebras. Scooters are ubiquitous (something which won’t be a surprise to anyone who’s ever been in Italy).

( Narrative + photos )

Food and drink. We ate a substantial amount of fish of various kinds, that being a dominant theme in Sicilian cooking. We discovered Panelle, following the advice from a waiter at the Trattoria Piccolo Napoli, probably the nearest restaurant to our hotel. Good food at Ristorante Santandrea was enlived by a visit from a miming magician. We greatly enjoyed the tasting menu at the Osteria Dei Vespri, a restaurant with a wine list so voluminous it required a separate stool. Throughout our holiday we stuck to Sicilian wines, chosen either at random or more often on the advice of our waiter, and all were most drinkable.

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• Getting there
• Palermo
• Agrigento
• Catania
• Pompeii
• Just the photos

Kindle

I’ve bought a Kindle. I love it.

( Review )

Cables From Kabul

Cables From Kabul by Sherard Cowper-Coles (ISBN 978-0-00-743203-5).

( Review )

Sicily: Agrigento

After a week in Palermo our next stop was Agrigento, on the southern coast of Sicily. In principle getting there was a train trip; in practice a combination of engineering and poor information meant it was a train trip, a bus trip, a two hour wait in the sun at Aragona Caldare, and another bus trip. With better information the last three steps would have been a single bus trip.

Since we spent the remainder of the afternoon on the beach, with occasional breaks for the local ice cream/drink vendor and I to practice our English and Italian on each other, it wasn’t so different to plan in the end anyway.

( Temples! )

The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must

Apropos of this comment thread, since PTC and I don’t seem to have been able to come up with a good answer: If the Melian dialog is the middle of a trilogy, and Ozymandias the conclusion … what’s the first part?